These are the ones we carry long after the final page. The ones we try to explain to others only to realize that no words quite capture what they did to us. They are the ones that deserve more noise, more conversation, more… something; anything, really. But somehow, they sometimes slipped through the cracks of trending lists and algorithm-driven praise, or, merely get forgotten about over time.

This is not a list of bestsellers—at least, not newly released bestsellers. But nevertheless, they’re stories I just don’t hear enough about by readers. As though, they’re charm and popularity diminished as quickly as they may have been hyped.

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Consider this a travel itinerary. A collection of places I’ve travelled to, not by plane or train, but by page. Stories that took me somewhere, asked something of me, and left a stamp I cannot quite erase.

If my Literary Passport existed in ink and paper, these would be amongst its worn and weathered pages, that I would definitely stamp again, and again, and again.

✈︎ Vienna, Austria. 1946
The Lost Baker of Vienna by Sharon Kurtzman

Vienna is a place that always feels like it’s holding its breathe. In The Lost Baker of Vienna, that breathe is filled with flour dust and memory. This is a story of survival wrapped in something deceptive. It’s the act of creating something warm in a world that has gone cold.

By the time you realize what this story is doing to you, you’re standing there, in the bakery with Chana, in the silence, unraveling the weight of everything you’ve just read. It earns your full attention with each chapter.

This was one of my top reads of 2025, and frankly, I wasn’t prepared for just what this story did to me.

✈︎ Austria & The Netherlands. 1936
The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton

Prepare yourselves, because this is not a journey, but rather a departure. This is a story rooted in the Kindertransport, where children were placed on trains toward uncertain safety, and it carries a devastation beneath its momentum.

You don’t read this book. You brace yourself through it. Because every bit of distance travelled becomes a dire question of who gets saved, and at what cost.

✈︎ Paris, France. 1939
The Room on Rue Amélie by Kristin Harmel

I’m almost shocked to include this book on the list, I’ll be honest. But I’ve come to the realization that unless you’re pretty familiar with Harmel’s work, The Room on Rue Amélie seems to be missed by a lot of readers.

Here’s the thing—Paris, in wartime, is never just Paris. It’s secrecy and resistance, and it' is survival hidden behind closed doors.

This story unfolds in rooms passed without noticing and lives lived behind walls. It’s in those spaces, that courage doesn’t look grand, but instead it looks like choice filled with risk.

✈︎ Berlin, Germany. 1961
The Berlin Apartment by Bryn Turnbull

This is a story about space—and I mean that in a physical, emotional, and even political sense.

An apartment becomes everything all in one. Refuge, prison, memory, and even identity. Berlin feels fractured, which, makes sense given the time frame of this novel. But within the fractured and divided city, there are so many lives that inhabit it just as fractured and divided.

This is one of those stories that settles into you slowly, almost imperceptibly, until you realize it has made a home within your very soul.

✈︎ Krakow, Poland. 1943
The Kommandant’s Girl by Pam Jenoff

There is tension in every, single, line, of this story. And I don’t say that lightly. Identity becomes a performance, and survival becomes a strategy.

This isn’t exactly what I would call an easy read, but it is absolutely a gripping one. It’s a story where every decision carried weight, and where love, loyalty, and danger blur into something almost unrecognizable.

✈︎ Sils Maria, Switzerland. 1943
The Night of the Pearls by Giuliana Arena

This story echoes—not literally, of course, but don’t blame me if you do end up hearing the whispers of ghosts. What I mean is that it echoes across time and across generations by way of choices that cannot be made undone.

Set against the stillness of the Swiss Alps, The Night of the Pearls carries an intensity within its story, filled with equal measures of guilt and love. And maybe a bit of the way the past refuses to stay buried.

It’s both beautiful and heavy, and believe me, it lingers.

✈︎ Virginia, U.S.A. 1930s
The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman

I’m just going to pre-warn you right here and now: THIS STORY UNSETTLES IN A WAY THAT STAYS WTIH YOU! There’s really no easy way to put this other than merely saying that this is brutal read.

Set against the backdrop of eugenics-era America, this is not for just historical fiction, but a confrontation with truths that feel far too close for comfort.

It’s haunting, but it’s necessary. This book gutted me. Page after page, I was gripped by a rising sense of injustice and helplessness. I had no idea such atrocities occurred on American soil—and Wiseman brought this history to life in such vivid, raw detail, I couldn’t look away. The fact that these stories have been so quietly buried in the margins of history makes this novel even more urgent. And impossible to forget.

✈︎ Toronto, Canada. 1971
Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall

This one I remember lost of talk about a few years back when it was originally published. Since then, however, it is as though the story seems to have vanished into silence.

I read this one recently for the first time, and yes, I was super “late to the party,” but this is… horrific, to say the very least. Not the book, mind you—that was phenomenal, and I truly do mean that. But the history that’s brought to life within its pages carries a terrifying weight.

Marshall deserves a second wave of praise for Looking for Jane because this book is both tender and and fierce all at once, while being deeply rooted in rights and autonomy.

Ladies, trust me… you want to read this.

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This is what I mean when I say I travel through books. Not just to places, but to moments. To lives I would have never known, or histories that demand to be remembered.

And while these particular stories may not always dominate the shelves of “most talked about” reads, reality is, they really should. Because somewhere between Vienna and Berlin, Paris and Toronto, Switzerland and rural America… I found pieces of something that stayed.

If you’re looking for place to escape to this week, amongst the chaos of your day-to-day, consider boarding one of these books, and experiencing a time and place that you won’t soon forget.

Your Literary Passport it looking a little in need of a new customs stamp…
Where do you want to go next?
I’ve probably got a rec for that boarding pass.

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It didn’t.

There were a few books this month that I should have loved, but didn’t. A couple of ARCs that left me more frustrated than anything else. And yes…a few of those “everyone is raving abut this” reads that just didn’t quite do it for me…

We’ve all been there. It happens. But, because it always does, there of course were a handful that reminded me exactly why i keep reaching for the next one.

Out of nineteen books, I’ll be recapping the ones that didn’t just pass the time, but settled in somewhere deep within my soul.

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Meet my Top-Shelf stamps from April
(yeah, these are the ones that earned their place)

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
I’m still not over this one. And how did I not know this happened?
I’ve read about the Titanic—it’s utterly well known. I’ve read about the Lusitania—it’s one of the shifting point of World War I. But have I been living under a rock to know have even heard about the MV Wilhelm Gustloff? Little known fact: it’s widely considered the largest maritime disaster in history.
Pick up this book. It’ll emotional drain and devastate you simultaneously. Worth ever second of sleep you’ll lose while not being able to put it down.
YA is just over here stepping in to completely dismantle my ongoing scepticism with the genre—touché.

The Signare of Gorée by Laura Rahme
This one subtly surprised me. I anticipated to enjoy it—a 19th century Agatha Christie-style mystery? Say less. But I did not expect to be blown away.
New-to-me author, and I already know this won’t be my last by Rahme. She hooked me with the very first sentence of this book, and I’m genuinely angry at every responsibility that pried me away from my paperback.
When I tell you this is one of the most enthralling, captivating, and lyrical novels I have ever read—I’m not putting that lightly. You aren’t merely reading the book, you’re basically living right there within the pages.
This isn’t a difficult read, but it is a heavy subject, even if you don’t quite realize it as you go. You’re exploring a really distasteful point in history, and it’s looming in the background the whole way through a murder investigation. It’s messy, but it’s murder, so it kind of has to be. I was blown away. Truly.
Get ready to get lost in the secrets and superstitions of this tiny island off the coast of Senegal. Read it now, thank me later. But actually, you will thank me.

I, Medusa by Ayana Gray
I didn’t ease into this one, I literally devoured it.
You think you know Medusa by the mythology—you don’t.
Get ready to settle in for a retelling that feels sharp and completely immersive. It’s one of those reads where you look up and realize you’re much further in than you thought you were.
Madeline Martin said she read it in one sitting. I didn’t realize just how right she was until I noticed I’d already finished the book.

Normal People by Sally Rooney
This one just…worked. I can’t quite describe it, but its absolutely worth any of the hype you’ve seen on it. It’s simple in a way that isn’t actually simple at all. It’s relatable, a little messy, and just so very human.
It’s firmly living in my head rent-free. And yes, I’ve heard about the adaptation… I ay need to investigate.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I won’t lie, this took me a minute.
The things is, once it settled, it settled. Its absolutely worth the patience it asks you for, because by the end, I was full in it, and so sad it was over.
I’ve now got to go find The Angel’s Game to read next. His writing is magnetic and atmospheric. Tell me again why I sat on Zafón for so long? You don’t know? Yeah, me either…

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Honestly, I went into this not entirely sure what I was getting into. I tend to go into books relatively blind, but I needed to understand—so after the synopsis, I found myself straggling through some reviews. They’re really mixed. But, after reading the book, I’m almost tempted to think this book is just oddly genre-classified, and people are going into it expecting a fantasy novel about vampires, or a horror story seeped in endless murders.
Is it based around the legend of Dracula? Yes. Do people die in this story? Yes.
Is it a horror fantasy? No.
The Historian is a historical gothic novel—that’s the baseline foundation of it. It’s centring around the very real mystery of Vlad the Impaler’s burial place and remains. Kostova just spun that history into an already notable legend of Dracula—which is loosely already inspired by Vlad III.
This book is incredibly well written and deeply researched. It spans centuries, and various settings, multiple narrators… quite frankly, The Historian is one of the most layered stories I have read in a very, very long time. And I was hooked—beginning to end, I fretted setting it down.
If you enjoy history—this is Historical fiction with a strong pull into myth and mystery. If you’re looking for fantasy… it won’t be your thing. If you somehow go to this title because it’s labelled supernatural horror, I apologize, but you were kind of deceived with false advertisement…

It wasn’t my strongest moth, but it wasn’t a wasted one, either.

I didn’t get through everything I had planned (do I ever?), and my mood absolutely took the wheel more than once. But that’s reading. It’s never as structures as we think it’s going to be.

You can plan every stop, map every destination, and still find yourself somewhere else entirely unexpected. Someties better, sometimes not.

And while April didn’t take me everywhere I meant to go, it gave me a handful of place I know I’ll return to on another literary adventure. And honestly, that’s more than enoguh

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April, for everything it wasn’t, still gave me the on thing I return to books for in the first place: escape.

Not the light, whimsical kind, but the necessary kind. The kind that meets you where you are and gives you somewhere else to sit for a while.

Last month carried more weight than I had anticipated. Between my mum finishing her final round of chemo and being scheduled for surgery just a few weeks later, April became a blur of hospital days, waiting rooms, corridor walks, and more appointments than I can count. They’re the kind of days that feel both flow and overwhelming all at once, if you know what I mean.

She’s home now. Recovering well. And while there’s still a road ahead, we’re finally on the other side of what felt like the steepest part of it all.

Somewhere in the middle of everything…it was also my birthday. Strangely, both moments ladned on the same day. Which, in a funny way feel a little fitting. It was a little chaotic, a little emotional, but meaningfully all the same.

So, in honour of both my birthday, and my mums surgery, I promise something to celebrate—it’s due time that a share it.

If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know I’ve been hinting at some changes to this little corner of the internet, dedicated to my books, my thoughts, and my very many opinions. And the next phase of those changed are officially taking shape…

In just a few days, it’ll be official:
Between the Pages: In Conversation with…

It’s a new series here on Substack! I’ve been “sitting down” with some amazing authors, and stepping just beyond the final page right inot the stories behind the stories, the process, the details we don’t don’t know are happening, yet somehow shape everything we read…

And I couldn’t imagine starting with anyone other than Kate Quinn!

If you’re following me on Instagram, you probably already know how much I adore her work—so yes, this one felt rather surreal.

We’ll be diving into The Astral Library which was recently released in February, and along with it… a giveaway.

A signed hardcover. Sprayed edges and all—because anything less simply wouldn’t do.

And for those of you here, reading this now, you’ll have a bit of a head start. Before this goes live anywhere else, I’ve got early entry opportunities waiting for you…

Consider it your bonus entries, before the rest of the world catches up.

Full early entry rules and regulations at the end of this post

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As for what’s following me into May…

Well, the stack is, as always, wildly optimistic. But let’s get right into my hopeful travel itinerary:

A Shadow in Moscow by Katherine Reay (yes, it’s making yet anoter appearance—third time’s the charm so I’m told, and I’m determined).
Mist Over the Channel Islands by Sarah Sundin (this, too, is still waiting patiently)
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper
Dragon Spring Road by Janie Chang

And a few others that have been patiently waiting just long enough that I have no excuse left not to pick them up. Alongside a couple of ARCs, and a buddy-read or two…
We’ll see where the month decides to take me.

May will be an easier reading month. I say this at least from a time perspective, because I have a feeling that the books on my TBR are bound to destroy me. And I’m okay with that…it’s what I’m longing for.

If April taught me anything, it’s that I’ll get to the books when I get to them. After all, I always do.

Let’s see where May takes me ✈︎

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22:55

In the late hours of 24th April, 1974, the night does not announce itself.

It settles into the narrow street. Into the spaces between buidings where sound carries just a little too far. It settles into homes where windows are closed before words are spoken too loudly.

Lisbon, like the rest of the country, knows how to hold a night a night like this, almost eerily.

In the distance, a radio merely left on rather than listened to, hums somewhere softly. In a kitchen, perhaps. Or a café preparing to close. Or beside someone who has long since learned that sound is safer when it is ordinary…

And then a song begins to play…

♫

…E Depois do Adeus, by Paulo de Carvalho.

Nothing about it was seeking attention, nor was it asking it be remembered in any way. It passed softly through the air the way all permitted thing do, and yet, somewhere, someone stilled. Not enough to be noticed, mind you, but just enough to hear it properly, and to recognize it was not merely music being played. But that it held meaning.

The city didn’t change when Carvalho’s love song played. Trams carried on, not stopping mid-track. Doors were not thrown open, nor voices raised above another. Everything visibly continued as it always had. But the air changed, whispering a melody filled with meaning that only those privy to it understood.

Behind walls that did not speak, and across distances not marked on any map a civilian would recongize and understand, men, who had already made their decisions, waited. Nothing left to discuss, nothing left to be said. The only thing that remained, was to follow a carefully orchestrated plan.

Time moved, yet somehow, to those who knew, it felt suspended. It stretched, thin and taut, between what had been done before, and what had not yet begun.

23:12

Perhaps a light turns off somewhere it normally wouldn’t. Or maybe, a door closes more cautiously than usual. Or maybe, its an engine the starts, then stops, then starts again.

Nothing that could be called unusual to catch attention. Nothing that could be named.

But still, the air whistles its silent tune, woven within its soft April breeze from across the Tejo. Because Lisbon knew what was or the horizon, and within her shadows, she masked a secret on the verge of unravel.

23:27

The city breathes the way it has been taught to breathe after so many years.

Carefully, measured. Without drawing attention to herself, just as she has done so for decades.

She knows that she is about to forget how soon… and she relishes in the thought of being able to return to herself, refreshed.

23:41

Movement exists now, but only if you know where to look.

A shift here.
A delay there.
A presence that did not belong, but was not questioned, because questioning had never been the habit…

00:00

The clock struck midnight, and the day changes. The night deepened now, as few held their breathes, waiting.

And with it, something else did as well.
Something close to inevitability.

00:20

12:20 struck, and with it, everything else, too, as a second song enters into the air…

♫

Grândola, Vila Morena
Terra da fraternidade

…Grândola, Vila Morena by José Afonso.

It would not slip unnoticed, it wouldn’t ever have been able to.

O povo é quem mais ordena
Dentro de ti, ó cidade

It is not just that the song is heard, but rather, that it is allowed to be.

A voice long kept from the airwaves now moved freely through them uninterrupted and uncontained.

There was no announcement or declaration. No voices to confirm what was in the midsts of happening. But for those who were waiting, there is no longer any doubt that the wait was over.

Movement followed in answer. It wasn’t all at once, or even loud. But it was everywhere.

And by the time the city began to wake; before the first full light settled across her curved terracotta rooftops… the country had already began to change.

Our story doesn’t begin here; like this… No story such as ours ever could.
And despite the fact that, if you stayed, living within those moments in the dead of night long enough, you could almost believe it had arrived out of nowhere… it didn’t.

Though this night started with a song.
Then another.
And then, a shift.
It wasn’t the beginning.

History certainly does not break without first bending. And Portugal had been bending relentlessly for far longer than a single night could ever hold.

Come back further with me. Before the songs, and before the silence broke; to a time, when the silence was all there was…

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If you had walked through Portugal in the decades before that night, you would not have necessarily seen anything that announced itself as oppression. There were no real visible fractures in the streets, no daily spectacles of fore that marked the country as unstable or unraveling. Life, on its surface, moved with a kind of quiet order; or at least, I’ve been told.

Trams ran while families gathered. Conversations unfolded in kitchens and cafés much as they did anywhere else, and still do today. But beneath that surface of façade, was a carefulness to just about everything.

It was not always spoken about directly, mind you, because it did not need to be. It was just simply, understood. It lived in the way voices lowered without being asked, or in the way certain topics dissolved before they could fully form. There was an instinct to measure not just what was said, but who might be listening when it was said.

This, was the legacy of the Estado Novo…

Under the leadership of António de Oliveira Salazar, and later Marcelo Caetano, Portugal was not governed through chaos or overt instability, but through control that was steady, deliberate, and deeply embedded into the rhythms of daily life.

Censorship itself, did not always arrive as something dramatic, at least not publically. More often than not, it arrived as absence, with its weight felt from articles that never made it to print or voiced that were never given the space to be heard.

The PIDE—the Portuguese political police (formerly PVDE, and later DGS)—did not need to be visible everywhere to be felt anywhere, either. Their presence existed in the uncertainty they created, and in the knowledge that information travelled in ways you could not necessarily trace. They instilled a fear that a conversation shared too free might not remain where you left it; that a neighbour, a colleague, or even someone you trusted, could become the reason you were questioned, or worse.

So people learned to be silent. Because if there’s one thing that became evident, it was that where silence was not chosen, it could however, be enforced.

People learned how to exist within a muted society. How to move through their own lives wihtut drawing attention. They leaned how to hold opinions privately, or at least, soften them, until they no longer resembled anything that could be considered dangerous.

Silence, over time, stopped feeling like restraint, and instead, became a habit.

I was not there. I did not live through those years under the Estado Novo myself. But I did grow up amidst what it left behind, being rasied in the habits that lingered long after the regime itself had fallen.

Not in fear, exactly, but in something slightly adjacent to it, maybe. A kind of inherited caution that wasn’t exactly present, but shaped behaviour all the same without really understanding why.

I grew up in a household where openness was something to be measured. Where speaking too freely, too directly, or too confidently, could be met not with disagreement, but rather with a curt and immediate correction—

“Lower your voice”
”Be careful”
”You don’t know who might hear you”

These were not rules explained in full, they were just merely instincts passed down, that, as a young child, I didn’t understand. But I would, later.

My mother grew up in a building situated within one of Lisbon’s-then most prestigious neighbourhoods. My grandfather was a government employee within the Brazilian Embassy, and my grandmother the perfect homemaker. They dined with government officials, travelled with Ambassadors, and sipped tea and bitter bicas amongst what was close enough to have been considered nobility at the time. I came to learn, the life that I enjoyed so much as a child while with my grandparents, was quite the façade in the 50s, 60s and 70s, because beneath the perfection that their lives appeared to have been, there was actually a lot of fear instilled.

Within their building, resided two PIDE officers; one on the first floor, and another on the second. She speaks of it now not with any sort of dramatics, but with a kind of matter-of-face clarity that make it all the more unsettling. The building and her neighbourhood, like many others, held a division that I still cannot seem to quite wrap my head around, if I’m honest. You had those who were careful, and those, who were useful. Those who kept to themselves, and those who understood how to navigate the system to their advantage.

No one needed to explain which was safer. The reality was, neither truly was. You could still be picked up, in the middle of the night, right from the comfort of your own bed. Be it for information provided by the useful, or those same useful being picked from their slumber because their information didn’t quite meet expectation… And she witnessed its aftermath on more than one ocassion.

My father’s experiences were a bit different, leaning a little more telling, yet somehow, also leaving him a little more…care-free, if you can believe it. He has described moment that, on their own, sound almost absurd in their simplicity. Being detained with a group of commuters after stepping off a bus in Benfica. Being taken in after reporting my grandfathers car which had been stolen, had been found nearby—its window broken and its fuel gone; nothing more than a joyride. There was no crime in the act of reporting it, but still, he was held. Not because he had done something wrong, but because authority did not need a reason to assert itself.

These are just a few tales of many. And the crazy thing is, these are not extraordinary stories. That in itself, I think, it was stays with me—the fact that they are completely ordinary for the time.

They are the kinds of moments that settle into memory and become aprt of how a person understands the world around them. Not through singular acts of violence or radical performance, but through repetition. Through unpredictability. Through the steady erosion of certainty about what is safe and what is not.

This was the environment Portugal carried through during its regime of fascism…

It was a country not erupting, but merely containing itself. A country, where control had become so deeply integrated into daily life that it no longer needed to be imposed loudly. It was instead maintained through awareness and through caution. Through the understanding that speaking was, at times, not without consequence.

The thing is, Portugal had not always lived this way. Silence, like anything else, had to be learned. And before it became instinct settling into household and conversations, it was built. Deliberately. Piece by piece, until it no longer felt constructed at all.

In the 1930s, as much of Europe shifted uneasily beneath the weight of political extremes, Portugal turned inward.

Under Salazar, the Estado Novo took shape not as a regime laced in ridiculous display, but as one of control thrugh stability. Or at least that was how it presented itself. It promised order in a world that seemed increasingly defined by unrest. It positioned itself against the perceived chaos of liberalism, the threat of communism, and the volatility of a continent inching toward war.

For a time, that promise truly did hold a certain appeal. Portugal did not descent into the same visible devastations that would later define much of Europe during World War II—though, it doesn’t mean the country and its people had been left unscathed.

There were no bombed cities, no occupation forces marching through its streets. From the outside, it appeared removed from the worst of it. But “distance” from war. didn’t mean absence of it, nor of its consequences. And consequently, in the end, it meant control could tighten without interruption.

As the rest of the world fractured and rebuilt, Portugal remained relatively contained and insulated. One may even go so far as to say increasingly rigid in its structure. The regime chose neutrality, and with that, they strengthened its hold not through moments of rupture, but through continuity. Through the careful shaping of what could be seen, what could be said, and even, what could be known.

Information started, slowly, being filtered. Opposition was limited before it could gather form in order to not sharpen its teeth. And overtime, systems were put into place to ensure that deviation did not go unnoticed.

It was within this environment that the political police at the time, PVDE, expanded and rebranded inot what it would become—PIDE—not simply an institution, but a shadowed presence. One that did not always need to act in order to be effective.

The fear of communism, particularly, in the post-war years, become one of the regime’s strongest justifications for its methods. It alloweed surveillance to be framed as protection. Control to be framed as necessity. And dissent, be it real or imagined, to be framed as a threat to the nation.

From there, the lines all seem to have blurred in some off-handed zone struck between safety and restriction; between loyalty and suspicion; between neighbours and observers.

Political prisoners were endless, and prisons overflowed. Our government even went to far as to take a page out of Hitler’s playbook, and created a solitary prison on a remote part of Cabo Verde—a concentration camp, in truth, strictly, for those who stood up or spoke against the regime. It was for the safety of a country still mending… Or at least, that was a safety-net excuse. But those left behind after a loved one had vanished, or cast off on a ship, knew better when the minutes turned to hours, the hours to days, and so forth. And with that, silence was taught all the faster.

By the time the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the structure was alreafy established. It has settled into the coutnry not as something temporary, but rather as something enduring. It became a system that had, over decades, shaped not just in governance, but behaviour as well.

Most people settled in to their newly acquired roles, and their newly developed routines, turning a blind-eye, and keeping their mouths shut, in hopes it would guarantee their safety. They didn’t need to be told to be careful, because they’d already learned they had to be.

This, is the Portugal my parents were born into. Not in the early moments of its creation, but rather the results of it. A country where silence was no longer imposed as something external, but carried internally. Where caution was not always enforced, but practiced.

By then, PIDE was no longer just an institution people feared, but it had actually turned into something people anticipated. Something that existed in the background of daily life, even when it was not not necessarily visible—actually, especially, when it wasn’t visible.

And so, the stories I grew up hearing—the ones taht seemed small when spoken aloud, even almost incidental in their details, when recognizing where it was all deriving from, started to almost make sense as normal.

And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous part of it all.
It’s not the fear itself, or even the control and silence.
it’s the ease with which is all began to feel…normal.

Because when something become a norm, it stops being questioned. It stops being resisted. it simply become the way things are. It becomes accepted, and carreid forward without ever quite being challenged in full.

For a time, that actually was enough.
It was enoguh to maintain order, enough to preserve the illusion of stability.
It was enough to keep a country quiet.

That is, until, the regime made a mistake. And that, was a trigger-point into, finally, a nation preparing to say “enough, is enough.” Not loudly, mind you. It was definitely not in ways that could be immediately named or even pointed to. But, with each passing moment, and each extended agitation, it became more and more steadily shaped.

While Portugal remained contained within itself, the world beyond its borders was shifting. Changing and moving forward in ways that the regime refused to acknowledge, let alone follow

And inside the country, too, there were those who could no longer ignore the weight of what had been built or the repercussions that followed.

Not because they had suddenly become defiant. But because they have begun to see, with increasing clarity, that what was being held onto was broken, and could not last forever.

Silence may have withstood, but it came at a cost. And that cost was no longer something that could remain hidden beneath routine, or softened by habit. So slowly, it began to surface in places the regime could not fully control, and more so, in people it could no longer fully command—and they, themselves, were probably one of the biggest surprises of all to the regime.

Here’s the thing—things for the Salazar government didn’t break all at once. That is not how something built over decades gives way to collapse. A lot of the time, it actually tightens first, and resists. It holds on longer than it should, while still appearing to remain intact. Long enough that those within it can almost convince themselves that it will continue to hold.

But pressure is quite an interesting thing when you think about it. So much beauty can be born through it. But before you get your polished and sparkling diamond, as an example, the coal is going to feel some weight…

For Portugal, that pressure didn’t even begin within her native borders. It didn’t start in the capital, nor in the remnants of laboured-intensive mines build in poor conditions…

It actually began far from the mist-filled streets and shuttered windows. Far from the cafés where conversations were softened, and teh homes where silence had long since been learned…

It began, instead, in 1961, in Angola.

What unfolded there was not, at first, understood as the beginning of something that would consume an entire nation. It was framed, as so many things had been, as something manageable and temporary.

A slight uprising, they said; a mild disturbance. Something that could easily be handled. The problem, though, was that Angola was no alone. Guinea-Bissau followed. Mozambique after that. And what had begun as something distant, become a war without a clear end; stretched not only across continents, but across years.

For those at home, the war didn’t initially feel like there was any cause for alarm. There wasn’t any particular immediacy of destruction—let’s be frank, this wasn’t a war that came to us; we instead, went to it. So rather than bombs falling over Lisbon or Porto, we were met instead with absence.

Young men leaving and not returning; or at times, returning changed—older than they shuold have been, even quieter than they once were, broken; emotionally, mentally, and physically.

Letters were sent acorss oceans, carrying fragments of a reality that could not be fully described nor understood. And with each passing year, the distance between what was being said, and waht was being lived, began to widen.

For those within the military, that distance was particularly impossible to ignore. After all, they were he ones asked to sustain it. To fight a war that no longer made sense in the way it once had. To maintain the idea of an empire that the rest of the world had already begun to relinquish. To uphold a structure that was not evolving, nor acknowledging the reality unfolding beyond its borders.

The regime, for its part, didn’t bend. Even under Marcelo Caetano, who had succeeded António Salazar in 1968, and placed notions of possible reforms in the head of his citizens, didn’t actually allow change to happen. If anything, it somehow felt worse, as a failing continuations of a regime that was becoming untenable due to the costs of an unsustainable colonial war, who made suggestions without actions.

And actions, when it came to the question of the colonial wars ends, never truly arrived. So wars continued, and costs deepened. And the burden fell, increasingly, on those who had once been expected only to carry it.

By the early 1970s, the strain was no longer abstract. It became structural, existing in the economy, and stretched thin by the cost of a war that demadned more than it coud upholf. It existed in the military, where promotions stalled, careers stagnated, countless died, conscriptions excelled, and frustrations sharpened into something more defined.

As young conscripts returned home with harsh forms of PTSD and stories of a futile war, an understanding began to form that professional officers were the ones responsible for sending their own countrymen to die, for a cause they no longer even believed in. And this all existed in the realization that there was no clear resolution in sight.

It is one thing to endure something difficult when there is a means to an end. It is another entirely, to have to endure somethin that does not appear to be moving toward any end at all.

In 1973, that realization had found a voice within the very institution the regime depended on to maintain itself. When military General, António de Spínola, published Portugal and the Future, it did not introduce something entirely new. The doubts and concerns that had already existed beneath the surface amongst soldiers and civilians alike, only exhausted futher the acknowledgements of failure.

The argument was simple, and because of that, it was all rather impossible to ignore.

The war could not be won by force.

That statement did not, on its own, bring anything to an end. But it did manage to give shape to what had, until then, remained largely unspoken. And once something is recognized, articulated, and shared, it becomes far more difficult to contain…

Within the Armed Forces, particularly among younger and mid-ranking officers, a shift was already underway the moment Spínola was removed from his position, merely for voices a truth the regime refused to grasp. They had seen war firsthand; they carried it, and they had begun to understand, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, that what was beign asked of them no longer aligned withwhat was possible, or what was right.

From there, something formed. As though those involved knew, instinctively, that whatever came next would need to be measured against everything that had come before. It couldn’t be something reckless or sudden, but rather deliberate, careful, and organized.

The Armed Forces Movement—the MFA—was not born out of a single moment, nor a singularact of defiance. It emerged from accumulation and shared experiences. From the slow, undeniable recognition that the system they were part of was broken beyond repair and needed to change.

By early 1974, the structure was no longer simply under pressure, but blatantly beginning to fail. Attempts to suppress that failure, such as the uprising at Caldas da Rainha in March, did not restore control. If anything, they revealed just how far it had already slipped. And once that was visible, it could no longer be denied.

By then, the silence that had once held the country together was beginning to loosenits grip just enough that when the movement came, it would not be met with just as much recognition as resistance. So when the time the night of 24th April arrived… Portugal was no longer simply waiting—it was ready.

When the signal came…it was not the beginning, but rather the answer.

Let’s return then, to that night—
to the hours that followed midnight when whathad been building for decades finally began to crumble.

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As the final notes of Grândola, Vila Morena carried through the airwaves, something imperceptible to most; unmistakable to a few, shifted from waiting into action.

There was no proclamation to mark it, nor publication issued inot the night to signal that the cuntry had crossed into something new.

But across Lisbon and far beyond it, order were already being followed as unit began to move. There was no frantic urgency to thier motion, nor disarray or confusion. Each movement had been considered long before it was carried out. Each route understood, and each objective across the country defined.

From barracks and bases, convoys emerged into the night purposefully. They amply entered the streets without flooding them. Measured in their advance, disciplined in their quietness, they moved forward toward the places that matter most—not to the public eyes, but to the structure of the State itself.

Between 03:00–04:00, troops went toward broadcast stations, the airport, the ports military headquarters, and government buildings; strategically, they sought the arteries through which control had long been maintained.

Communications which had been so carefully controlled for decades became one of the first things to shift. Radio stations, once governed by restrictions and oversight, were taken and repurposed. Messages began to move differently now as instructions, confirmations, controlled transmissions were guiding the unfolding operations.

At 04:27, a voice came across the radio, as the MFA issued their first bbroadcast across airwaves, asking a population to remain at home and avoid confrontations…

“Mantenha a calma, e se recolha às suas residências.
Viva Portugal!”
——
”Stay calm, and stay home.
Long live Portugal!”

To those not expecting it, it did not immediately register as a breach. Sure, it felt…unusual; then, unfamiliar. But as Portugals madrugada—the early hour before dawn—drew on, things were becoming noticeable.

At 06:15, as dawn rose across a country holding its breathe, the forces unleashed from Santarém’s Cavalry Practical School, arrived in Lisbon, lead by Salgueiro Maia to control the city’s Terreiro do Paço square without resistance.

Lisbon, ever so coy and observant, did not erupt at their arrival. She absorbed the gallantry; a tank at an intersections where one had not stood the night before; a convoy passing through a street that had, until then, belonged only to early morning quiet. Figures moved with intent where there had once only been stillness.

What is perhaps most striking, in hindsight, is not that the coup succeeded, but how little resistance it met in those first crucial hours. The regime, built on control, did not respond with immediate force.

Whether through hesitations, miscalculations, or sheer precision of what had already been set in motion, the structure in itself did not strike back with the violence it had so long reserved for dissent, and so, the movement continued…

By the time the city began to shit from night into early morning, the foundations of pwoer had already been intercepted. They weren’t being destroyed, just…taken. And yet, for many, the full wieght of what was happening hadn’t yet settled fully.

By 07:00, people stepped out into the streets cautiously, defying order to remain indoors.

They were met with soldiers—troops by thousands.

They were not out in passing. Nor were they contained to barracks or distant exercises. They were just standing, right there, within the city itself, unnerved and reserved. Tanks, too, deliberately occupying space rather than tearing through it.

There was no immediate panic, and that in itself, is important to understand. Because what Lisbon felt in those first moments wasn’t fear, but uncertainty. People did what people always do in moments that do not yet make sense—they watched. They stood at windows first, then at doorways next.

It hadn’t taken long for curiosity to overcome caution. Something about the soliders didn’t align with what fear should have looked it. They weren’t advancing on the people. They weren’t dispersing crowds or enforcing silence. They were merely… waiting.

And in that wait, came interaction. There was a word exchanged here, or a question asked there, as few wandered into the street to understand what was happening. Hesitations slowly turned into conversations. And with each small moment, recognition moved through the city that this was not an occupation, nor an invasion.

For the first time in decades, the presence of armed men in the streets did not signal control. And though no formal annuncement had been made to explain what was happening, people understood.

For years, authority in Portugal had not needed to hesitate. It has always just acted swiftly and often without warning; an control was maintained over decades not only through presence, but through consequence. And so, even as the city began to see its residents edge forward into a moment that did not yet have a name, there lingered the expectation that it could still turn, as people wondered how the regime would respond.

At around 09:00, that question found its answer. Loyalist to the regime positioned themselves against the military units aligned with the Armed Forces Movement. The lines, though not formally drawn, were suddenly clear enough to feel feel as orders were issues and weapons were raised.

For a moment, however brief and suspended, it seemed as though everything might collapse into violence; exactly what Portugal was fearing through wavered breathes.

Navy units were maneuvering themselves in front of Terreiro do Paço on orders by the Estado Novo government, with the instruction to fire upon Salgueiro Maio and his troops in the square.

But then, nothing happened.
The order to fire was given, and it was simply just not obeyed.

While the Navy had not initially been involved in the coup lead by the April-Captains, a clandestine group of naval officers supported the MFA movement, contributing to the ultimate paralysis of the regimes loyalists.

By late-morning, people were no longer watching from a distance. What had begun in ambiguity with glimpses from behind curtains or half-opened doors, no longer held any room for doubt. They stepped out onto cobblestone from doorways, as Lisbon flooded by civilians to support the insurgent military. And as people began to gather with a need to witness and support what was unfolding in front of them, there was a growing sense of possibility as Lisbon was transforming into the centre of a revolution.

It’s difficult to overstate what that meant meant in the moment. Not in theory, but there, in the streets, where tensions had reached their breaking point, yet held strong. Authority, which has always relied on action, faltered. Power, which had always moved downwards, hesitated.

The absence of gunfire did not simply preserve life, but it changed the nature of the moment in itself, and people felt it. And as the morning stretched into its final moments, Lisbon was no longer standing at the edge of history, but rather, she was the centre of it; living directly within it as the Carnation Revolution engulfed a nation in the brink of change.

So what of the carnations, anyway? Well, simply put, it didn’t begin as a symbol.

Celeste Caeiro was not a solider, nor a strategist.She was by no means a figure anyone would have pointed to in the early hours of that day, as someone who would become a significant part of todays memory.

She was a waitress. And that morning, she had gone to work expecting to celebrate the one year anniversary of the restaurant where she was employed. There was meant to be a celebration filled with meals served and glasses filled.

But instead, the doors never opened. The unfolding events across the city made that impossible, and so like many others, she was sent away, back into a Lisbon that was no longer behaving as it had the ngiht before.

She did not, however, leave empty handed. In her arms, she carried a bundle of red carnations, originally meant to be given to patrons for the celebration that would not have space to take place.

As she walked, the streets were no longer quiet. By then, soldiers stood among civilians as allies. Somewhere, within that convergence and confusion, Celeste asked a solider that was happening, to which she received the response that they were moving into the Largo do Carmo square, to apprehend Marcelo Caetano and gain Portugal her freedom.

Amidst an exchange of pleasantries, the solider asked if Celeste may have a cigarette in which she could offer him. She didn’t. And as she looked around the stores closed, and tobacco huts still shuttered, she lamented not being able to aid the soldier in his requested. Instead, she offered him one of her carnation, which he accepted. And instead of holding it, he placed it inside the barrel of his rifle.

One carnation, turned to two, two to three, and soon, her bundle had dispersed amongst the soldiers, all placed within their rifles.

It is easy now, to look back and see this as symbolism. To name it and understand what it came to represent. But in the moment, it was merely a gesture. And from that gesture, a weapon, long associated with control, now held something that would not harm. It was something fragile, and something alive; much like the people.

So as the day drew on, the streets were no longer just filled with people, but filled with colour. Red against metal, life against the machinery of force. And from there, the revolution found its image built from kindness and gratitude, brought on by the single distribution of a flower.

By mid-day, Marcelo Caetano had retreated, taking refuge in the Carmo Barracks.

There is something almost painfully fitting about the imagine of the head of a regime built on order, authority, and surveillence enclosed within stone walls, while the country outside began rearranging itself without him. He didn’t stand before the people or command the streets back into silence. He just withdrew into the headquarters of the National Republican Guard at Largo do Carmo, and there, surrounded by the MFA, 48 years of dictatorship were being counted down to its final hours.

The people had become part of the days occurrences. They stood in the square, pressed into the surrounding streets, watching the building that now held not only Caetano, but the visible shape of the Estado Novo’s power.

For so long, authority had lived everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It resided within office buildings and police station; within whispered warning or the way neighbuors watched one another. But now, for one strange afternoon, it seemed to have been condensed into one place; within on building and one surrounded door.

Everyone waited while negotiations spread across hours, within and around the barracks, as the afternoon spread on. It was by no means the suspended wait of the early hours in the day, when song moved secretly through rafio waves and men waited for signals only they understood. But publicly, a nation and her people waited for the final crash that would lead to their liberation.

The MFA forces remained positioned outside, as each hour carried the possibility that restraint would fail. A regime does not surrender merely because history has decided it should. It searches, instead, for ways to leave withut admitting that it had already been defeated.

Caetano, by then, understood enough to know that the structure around him had collapsed. But even in collapse, there was calculation to be made. He refused to hand power to Captain Salgueiro Maia, whose forces surrounded him, insisting instead on surrendering to General António de Spínola who has arrived at Carmo to negotiate the transfer of power, reportedly fearing that otherwise, power would be thrown into the streets.

It’s fitting, really, that Caetano would relinquish himself and his cabinet solely to the man, in which he’d dismissed from his post as Deputy Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff not long before.

But just like that, as the clocked reached 18:00 and church bells rang across a city, Caetano official agreed to surrender.

In an RTP—Rádio e Televisão de Portugal; Portugal’s public broadcast channel—archive, there is footage which records Spínola’s arrival for the surrender negotiations, and Salgueiro Maia preparing to enter the barracks to escort Caetano and ministers from his cabinet. And even to this day, this footage still manages to give me goosebumps.

I like to imagine that the sounds moving through the city rang differently that evening; that it was something all the more noticed. Bell chimes over terracotta and stone, over crowds gathered in squares, over soldiers still holding their positions, and over rifles softened by carnations.

For nearly half a century, Portugal had been taught to lower its voice. But in that moment, in a city that had spent the day disobeying silence, bells marked the hour when the old regime finally fell.

The regime that had taught generations to fear their own voices had been brought to its knees by soldiers who refused to fire, civilians who refused to stay indoors, songs that carried meaning through the dark, and by flowers placed where bullets might have been.

And for the first time, in a very long time, Portugal could begin to hear herself again as intended.

Today, 25th April, is still a day to remember and celebrate—not just the day in itself, but the memory of everything that lead to making it monumental. The past, when we look to it, has so much to say if only we listen. And maybe that is one of the reason I return to stories. History, when left to dates and outcomes, risks becoming something distant, contained merely within textbooks and timelines, filed away as though it has already finished unfolding.

History though, it lingers. It lives within memory and behaviour. It lives in the way a country learns to speak, or even forgets how to. In the stories passed down at kitchen tables, half explained and half understood, until someone pauses long enough to ask where it all came from.

Stories give history a pulse back in a new light. They allow us to step into moments we did not live thorugh, and yet somehow feel. They allow us to understand not only what happened, but what it meant. To somehow meet the people who stood in those streets, and held their breaths in those hours.

If you’re looking to understand the weight of regimes like the Estado Novo, or the resilience of those who lived beneath them, there are stories that carry those truths; both fiction and non-fiction, in a way that will place you there as it all happened.

Books that remind us that freedom, once lost, is never easily reclaimed, and once found, should never be taken for granted.

Long after the carnations had faded and the songs had ended, what remains are the stories we choose to keep telling, and how we choose to tell them…

So in honour of fifty-years of liberation, I would love to share every book, be it memoir or fiction, that had a place on this list. The problem, however, is so few seem to have been translated to english. So today, instead an endless array of recommendations, I’ll leave you a short stack of must-reads, in no particular order.

1. Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi

2. The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso

3. The Captains’ Coup: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Portugal by Wilfred Burchett

4. Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

5. A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson

6. Portugal and the Future by António de Spínola

7. Carnation Revolution: Volume 1 by José Augusto Matos

8. The Carnation Revolution by Alex Fernandes

9. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago

10. The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes

11. Raised From the Ground by José Saramago

12. Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes

13. Eyes Open by Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Liberdade Sempre ✌︎︎

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Not because you loved it, not because you hated it. But, because you didn’t actually know what to do with what you’d just read.

You flip the cover closed, maybe run your hand over it once, like that’s going to help you decide somthing—and it doesn’t. So you just kind of stare at it.

The worst part is that you could have loved it. The story was right there; you could feel it. There’s a version of that story, somewhere just beneath what you read, that works. It hits, and it stays. But this one didn’t, not quite. And somehow, that’s actually more frustrating than if it had just been bad.

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There’s a particular kind of disappointment that sits very heavily between what is and what could have been. And that’s a very difficult place to navigate

It doesn’t slam a book shut, or demand to be abandoned halfway through. It doesn’t frustrate in obvious ways, or provoke anger, or even necessarily dissatisfy in the traditional sense. It’s instead just an nuisance that you cannot quite seem to shake.

It’s a sudden urge to rewrite a sentence while reading, or skip-over a sixth consecutive name-drop. It’s a silent plea to the author, asking that they allow you to grasp things on your own, rather than be told every single detail—more tell than show, when it should be the opposite.

Every so often, you come across a story that has something. It’s got a pulse, it’s got a premise that intrigues, characters that hint depth, a world that almost—almost—comes alive beneath that words.

You keep reading not out of obligation, but out of hope. Hope that it will settled and it will sharpen. That i t will become… yet, in never quite does.

Then, when you reach the final page, you’re left not with the satisfaction of a story well told, nor the clarity of one that simply wasn’t for you, but something far, far more complicated as a reader: the persistent thought taht this could have been extraordinary… if only it had been given the time, the care, and the shaping it deserved.

What happens, then, in that moment? Not just as a reader seeking enjoyment—but as a reader who understands the weight of creation.

Because we are not logner living in a literary landscape where every book passes through the careful hands of editors, beta-readers, and gatekeepers before reaching us. The doors have opened, and rightfully so. There is something deeply important about accessibility in storytelling. About voices that might have once gone unheard now having the freedom of finding their way into the world.

But with that openness, there’s a responsibility that can at times become overlooked. And when it is, it lands, unrefined, in the hands of the reader.

I’ve been thinking abut this more than I expected to. About what it means to read something that is not bad, but not yet ready—these are by no means, the same thing.

A story that is simply not for you is easy to walk away from because it asks nothing more of you. You close the book and you move on. It dissolves into the long list of things that simply did not resonate.

But a story with potential? That’s different. And it’s difficult, because it does ask something of you.

It asks you to notice what’s missing. To feel where the pacing falters, where characters flatten, where repetition dulls what could have been sharp. It asks you to recognize the places where another draft, or another set of eyes, might have transformed it entirely.

Suddenly, reading becomes participation. So what do you do with that?
Do you speak?
Do you offer honest feedback knowing that on the otherb side of the page is a writer who has likely poured themselves into something they believed was ready?

Or, do you remain silent, choosing instead kindness over critique, even if that kindness borders on disservice, particularly if what you’ve just finished is a book on the brinks of publications?

Do you write a review that reflects your true experience, knwoing it may impact a new or independent author still finding their footing? Or do you soften it? Blur it? Turn it into something vague and palatable that says very little at all?

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is actually “is it our place to say anything at all beyond what the book made us feel?”

There is no clean answer here. The reality is, it is not simply about books. It is about people. About effort and vulnerability laid bare in the form of a story.

Independent publishing, in many way, is in itself an act of courage. It requires a belief in one’s work strong enough to place it directly into the hands of readers wthout the traditional safety nets of the industry.

But belief, on its own, is not always enough. And that is the part we do not talk about nearly enough.

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Here’s the thing… writing is not only creation. It is also refinements; revisions. It is the willingness to let something be shaped, challenged, and, at times, dismantled in order to become stronger.

Every story deserves that processs. And when that process is skipped, or rushed, the absence of it becomes visible in ways that readers cannot unsee.

So where does that leave us as readers? As people who love stories not just for what they are, but for what they can become.

I don’t believe in harshness for the sake of honesty. Nor do I believe in silence for the sake of kindness. But I do believe there is a middle ground. One that requires far more than either extreme.

Honesty, when offered, should be anchored in respect. Not assumption, not superiority. But in recognition that writing is difficult, that storytelling is a craft, and that growth is part of the process. And perhaps, sometimes, that honesty does not belong in a public space at all. Perhaps, it belongs in a private message. Or…perhaps it belongs nowhere but within your own reflections as a reader.

The truth is, not every thought needs to be voiced. And not every silence is passive. Sometimes, choosing not to continue with an author’s work is answer enough.

Not as punishment, mind you. Not as a boycott. But as an alignment of sorts. It becomes a recognition that what you are seeking as a reader does not currently meet what is being offered. And that that, too, is allowed.

There is a difference between a story that isn’t for you, and a story that hasn’t yet been given the chance to fully become what it could be. One is subjective, the other… well, that’s structural, developmental, and craft.

When you read enough, and I mean that in the sense of when you’ve sat inside enough stories, good and bad and everything in-between, you begin to feel that difference nearly instinctively.

Which brings me to the part that feels the most uncomfortable to sit with… What is the role of the reader in the moment? Especially, when you are not just a reader, but an ARC reader.

Early reading was never meant to be passive. it was never meant to be an exchange of early access for a star rating and a few hazy, indeterminate words strung together in a review. It was however, meant to be part of the process.

An early or late-stage set of eyes. A reader perspective offered before a book fully enters the world. Not to tear something apart, but to catch what might have been missed, to flag what doesn’t land, to reflect what is or isn’t yet working.

Somewhere along the way, that purpose has become blurred. Now, offering that kind of feedback can feel like overstepping. It’s like crossing a line that maybe was never clearly drawn in the first place.

Do authors want that level of honesty? Do they expect it? Or are early readers now simply an first-wave of promotion rather than participation?

It’s hard to know, really. And so, we hesitate. We soften, we round the edges, we say things like “it wasn’t for me” when what we really mean is “this needed another round of edits,” “this character never quite developed,” or “this could have been something exceptional with more time.”

We worry about discouraging someone who is still finding their footing, or criticizing something by authors who have been writing for years with a vast readership. We worry about being the voice that lingers in the back of their minds the next time they sit down to write.

So, because of that, we say less, or perhaps even, nothing at all.

Silence, though, has its own consequences, too., because writing is built on process. It’s drafting, then redrafting. It’s pulling something apart and rebuilding it again. It’s letting other people into the work before it’s ready, precisely so that it can become ready.

Alpha reader who help shape the early bones of a story.
Beta readers who test its strength, pacing, and clarity.
Editors—developmental, line, copy—each one refining something different, each one bringing the story closer to what it is trying to be.

None of these steps are ornamental. In fact, they’re all rather essential. They are the difference between a story that merely exists… and a story that endures! And when those steps are skipped, or rushed, or replaced with assumption that the work is already “there”… the absence is certainly not subtle.

It’s something that shows up everywhere. It’ll be found in characters who feel like echoes instead of people. In pacing that drags where it should move, or rushes where it should linger. It’ll be in repetition that dulls instead of deepens. In prose that tells you everything, and trusts you with nothing.

As a reader, you feel it, even if you cannot always quite articulate it. And in this current publishing landscape, that brings something else into focus… Independent publishing does not remove responsibility. If anything, it almost amplifies it.

Because without the built-in structure of traditional publishing such as the editors, the layered feedback, and the enforced timelines of revisions, the responsibilities to “prime and proper” a story rests entirely within the author. And that’s not criticism—not in any way, shape of form! But, it is a reality. And it’s a reality that require intention, investment and patience.

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Putting something into the world before it has been tested, challenged, and refined… well, it doesn’t just affect how that one book is received. It shapes how readrs approach everything that follows.

Trust, once unsettled, is difficult to rebuild. And that feels like a loss not only for the reader, but for the writer as well.

So again, we come back to the same questions that ask: What do we do with that, as a reader? Do we speak honestly, knowing it may sting but may also serve? Do we stay quiet, preserving kindness at the risk of clarity? Do we step away entirely, choosing not to engage further? Do we share generic insight of the plot, rather than our true feelings on the overall story? Do we get brutal in our honestly, and cast a negative shadow on an author?

I don’t think there’s erally a singular answer. But I do think that honesty and kindess are not opposites. They can exist together, simultaneously, but only when delivered with care, and only when offered in the right space.

Public critique and private feedback are not the same thing. Not every thought belongs in a review, just as not every silence is avoidance. Sometimes, the most respectful thing you can do is recognize where your voice is needed, and where it simply is not.

And sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is simply not continue. Not out of punishment, or out of dismissal. But out of alignment. Because reading… it’s a relationship you build for yourself with a story; with its characters, its setting, its plot. And not every book, or author, will meet you where you are, or where you hope to be met.

That is allowed.

But the thing that stays with me, more than anything, is that potential deserves more patience. From readers yes, but especially from writers. Once a story is released into the world, it is no longer only yours, and that’s important to understand. It becomes something others experience, interpret, inhabit, and remember. And if it’s not yet ready, that too, becomes part of its legacy.

Between the lines of every unfinished story is something waiting. It’s not failure nor inadequacy, though. It’s possibility.

And sometimes, the most generous thing we can do—be it as readers or writers; as people who care deeply about story—is to recognize the difference. And leave space for t to become something more.

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But, there’s something a bit ironic about World Book Day…

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World Book Day; a day meant to celebrate reading, storytelling, and the written word… that, depending on where you are in the world, can look very different from what it was originally intended to be.

Somewhere, between its inception and its current iterations, it has become both something meaningful, and even something a little… diluted.

But perhaps, that’sthe nature of things we try to celebrate on a global scale. They shift, they adapt, they become what people need them to be—or, sometimes, what the wrold turns them into.

World Book and Copyright Day, as it stands today, was established by UNESCO in 1995. The intention was simple, and honestly, quite beautiful. It was meant to promote reading, publishing, and the protection of intellectual property through copyright. It was meant to encourage the discovery—or rediscovery—and pleasures of reading, as well as honour the contributions of authors (which, I believe, have made the world all the better.)

It was also chosen with a certain poetic weight. The 23rd of April marks the death anniversaries of literary giants such as William Shakespeare and Ince de la Vega—two names that, in my ways, helped shaped the literary canon as we know it. Not to mention other prominent authors who also share this date as a birth or death anniversary.

It is, in many ways, a symbolic date, then, if we look into the day by ways of those who made such an imprint in literary once-upon-a-time. One rooted in legacy, in language, and in the enduring power of story.

In theory, it is a day meant to honour literature in its purest form. And in many places, it still does.

In countries like Spain, for example—specifically in Catalonia—the celebration aligns with traditions dating back to the middle ages with La Diada de Sant Jordi (St. George Day). Also known as Day of Books and Roses, it is a day where books and roses are exchanged as gifts. While originally celebrated in October, in 1930, it was changed to 23rd April to honour Miguel de Cervantes and his literary contributions, who also died on this literary-reflective day.

It’s a kind of literary love letter woven into cultural traditions. Streets filled with stalls, pages turning in the open air, stories quite literally passed from one hand to another. There’s something rather undeniably romantic about the celebration.

But then, there are other version that have shifted toward something more commercial; more performative. Where the focus leans less on reading itself, and more on costumes, marketing campaigns, and curated displays. Where children dress as characters—which, don’t get me wrong, is charming in its own right—but the act of reading sometimes feels secondary to the spectacle.

To me, I think when we look at the commercialization of something meant to be pure, it raises a question: what are we actually celebrating?
Is it the book itself? The act of reading? Or, is it the idea of books as something aesthetic and collectible—perhaps even seasonal?

These aren’t quite the same things. And yet… even in its most commercialized form, I find it difficult to dismiss the day. Because any moment that brings attention back to book; to stories, to reading, to the act of turning a page—well, that still holds some kind of value.

Even if it’s imperfect. Even if it’s been reshaped. Because the truth is, we need reminders, particularly in a world with declining literacy rates.

We need reminders in a world that moves quickly, that consumes endlessly, that prioritizes speed over stillness, that stories still matter. That reading still matters. That somewhere, between the noise and the scrolling and the endless stream of everything, there is something deeply grounding abut sitting with a book and allowing it to unfold as its own pace in your hands.

No notifications. No interruptions. Just you… and a story.

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Maybe that is what World Book Day is meant to bring us back to. Not the idea of perfection, or purity of intentions. Just simply awareness. A pause; a moment to remember why we read in the first place.

For some, it’s escape. For others, it’s understanding. For many, it’s both. It’s the ability to step outside of yourself for a while. To live another life, in another place, in another time. To feel something you may never have otherwise felt. To understand someone you may never have otherwise known.

Books do that so subtly, I think. They don’t demand your attention the way everything else seems to—especially in today’s modern world. Instead, they seem to somehow wait, and the moment when you’re ready, they offer you everything… even the things you hadn’t known you needed or could come to need.

So maybe, the way to honour World Books Day isn’t just to get caught up in what it has become, or what it was meant to be. Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe, it’s just… to read.

To pick up something that has been waiting on your shelf, or even something new. Or something old that you’ve loved before and want to return to an old friend.

If there is one thing that remains unchanged, regardless of how the day is celebrated, it’s that stories still have the power to move us. And that… well that is always worth celebrating.

And so, in the spirit of that—of stepping into something and letting story take hold—maybe the best way to honour World Book Day is exactly as it was always meant to be. With the books thenselves.

The ones that spark imagination, the ones that foster a love for reading in its simplest, purest form.

The ones that remind us why stories have endured for centuries in the first place. The classics that shaped the literary world, and the authors whose names are forever tired to this very date. The stories that encourage creativity, that stretch the mind just a little further than where it was before. The ones that feel engaging from the very first pages, impossible to put down, no matter how many times yu tell yourself just one more chapter.

Books that are accessibly, inviting, and open to all ages, because reading was never meant to belong to a select few. Books that allow you not just to observe a story, but to inhabit it; to live wtihin its pages, to move through its world as though, for a moment, it were your own.

Because at its heart, that is what today is meant to really be about. Not the displays, not the marketing gimmicks; not the performance of it all. But rather, the transformative experience of reading.

And so, whether you find yourself reaching for something timeless, something imaginative, something deeply human, or something that simply refuses to let you go, here are 23 book (to commemorate this 23rd April) that I, a historical fiction bookworm, think are worth reaching for today:

• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

• Hamlet – William Shakespeare

• War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

• Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

• The Things We Cannot Say – Kelly Rimmer

• A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles

• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

• All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

• Pachinko – Min Jin Lee

• The Astral Library – Kate Quinn

• The Bookbinder’s Secret – A. D. Bell

• The Dictionary of Lost Words – Pip Williams

• Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer

• The Lies They Told – Ellen Marie Wiseman

• The Correspondent – Virginia Evans

• The Secrets We Kept – Lara Prescott

• Theo of Golden – Allen Levi

• Keeper of Lost Children – Sadeqa Johnson

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I cannot sit quietly on the sidelines of something that is actively reshaping the very space I am working so tirelessly to enter. Here is the thing, my fellow readers and writers… anyone who reads or writes is ultimately, observing and living through this terrifying shit.

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As a new writer, and as someone who has spent nearly three years building a manuscript from nothing but passion and persistence—and far too many late nights filled with caffeine, but I digress—I cannotpretend that the rise of AI in this industry does not affect me, because the truth is, it does. Deeply.

And not jsut in theory or in passing concern, but in the ways that settles into the process itself with the writing, the editing, and the doubt.

I did not expect that, in trying to become a writer—a published author—I would find myself in a world where I may one day have to prove that I am human. And yet, here we are. In an age where even seasoned authors are exposing the most intimate moments of their creative processes just to demonstrate their writing in real time in order to prove themselves… well, I think it’s fair to say that something has gone unbelievably and undeniably wrong. And I can no longer stay silent on something that is already shaping the very ground I am trying to stand on. Because I am not merely watching this happen from the outside—I am writing within it.

There is something incredibly unsettling about the idea of a writer sitting on a live Zoom call… not to connect, but to prove that they wrote their own story; that those words are their own. That the hours spent at a desk, the drafting, the editing, the unraveling and rebuilding of sentences—all of it—was not done by a machine.

Literary Agent, Cece Lyra recently shared on Instagram about an instant where a seasoned and published author did just that…

We have arrived, it seems, at a moment in time where creation is no longer enough. Where the act of writing has become something that must now be defended, documented, verified, and witnessed, as though it were evidence in a courtroom, precisely as Cece said.

And the most frightening part is not that this happening—which is already on its own increasingly scary—but that fact that this actually somehow makes sense. Somewhere along the way, something shifted in a really horrifying way. The question no longer being “is this good?”, but turned into “is this even real?”

Writers are bieng asked to prove their humanity. Readers are beginning to queestion what they hold in their hands. Literary agents are being flooded with work they cannot fully trust. Publishers are in the middle of a PR nightmare because of it all. And beneath it all, something really fragile is beginning to fracture in creative spaces.

Belief in the work, the process and in each other is slowly unraveling—and that is tremendously frightening.

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I personally felt it before I even had the language for it. In the editing stages of my own manuscript in the last 18 months, months have turned into years. I’ve found myself returning to the same paragraphs over and over again in edits just to get it ready for query. The problem however turned into the fact that it has turned into being less about rectifying something “wrong” or that simply didn’t work, and became geared more toward the fact that I was—am—afraid.

I gained fear that something about what I had written might, or could be, mistaken. That a sentence to clean or too structured, might be read not as skill, but as something artificial.

Imagine that… Spending years researching, writing, proofing, and rewriting something built from the marrow of your very being, only to question whether it might look too AI-y; too correct to be believed as your own.

Suddenly, the smallest things begin to feel dangerous. An em-dash—oh, that could make some believe I did'n’t write this. A semicolon—whoops, had better delete that and completely restructure my sentence before someone accuses a computer of writing this instead of me. An ellipsis—nope, that absolutely has AI-trigger written all over it, better backspace.

Tools of language, once chosen with care, now sit under suspicion and scrutiny. This is not just abut AI, it becomes the bigger issue on what AI is doing to trust!

The issue is not only abut the disheartening reality that some are using it to create and pass off work as their own. It becomes the problem that in doing so, those individuals are reshaping the landscape for everyone else. They are introducing doubt and suspicion where there once was curiosity and anticipation.

That doubt by no means stays contained, either. It spreads like wildfires into manuscripts, inboxes, book reviews, publication deals, and into conversations between readers and writers alike. It embeds itself into the spaces where creation used to feel safe.

Literary Agent, , recently shared that she received 800 pitched in a single month. Can someone explain to me how she can, in today’s day-and-age, read through that and trust what she is seeing; what she is reading?

How do you hold space for genuine voices when you know, statistically and inevitably, that some of what sits before you could very well have been generated in seconds?

The reality is that you don’t, at least not fully. And so wiht that, the industry begins to shift in response, but not for the better.

Here is the truth that no one seems to be saying loudly enough, friends:
AI is not just creating content, it is altering the conditions under which human creativity exists!

It is making writers question themselves, and making readers question everything. It is making the act of publishing feel increasingly unstable—an indsutry which, with the decline in literacy rates over the years, is already fragile and complex,

And for those of us still sitting at our desks—raise your hands here new writers and seasoned published professionals—still writing and choosing each word with care… it, is, exhausting! I’ve personally reached a point, particularly here on substack, that I no longer even bother going back to edit before I hit publish—mistakes be damned, because at least they prove they were written by me and my hand!

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Writing has never been a race. It shouldn’t have to be about speed, volume and output. Yes, there will always be deadlines there will also be “performance expectations,” but speed is not the objective. Writing is about passion, it is about expression, it is about something stirring within you that needs to be released. It’s about attention and observation. It’s about the quiet, persistent act of shaping something that did not exist before you, into something that might, just maybe, matter to someone who reads it.

So what does it mean, then, to exist in a space where someone can generate a novel in minutes or hours rather than months or at times, years? What does it mean when quantity begins to overshadow craft? What does it mean, when the very definition of “writing”, begins to blur?

To me, I think it means we are being asked to hold two truths at once. That this technology exists, and will, inevitably, continue to evolve. And that what we do, and have always one as a writer, is not the same thing.

There is a temptation, in moments like this, to spiral into comparison and ask the question: How do I complete with that? I myself, have asked this 100 times over at this point. But the truht is… you just don’t. There isn’t a competition in it.

Writing was never, nor was it ever meant to be, a competition—not in this context, anyhow. A machine can generate text, it can mimic structure, it can assemble language in ways that resemble coherence—perhaps even beauty, in a sense. But while it may be able to do that, it misses the fundamentals that sit at the roots; within the hearts of each writer who has put pen-to-paper, or finger-to-keyboard… It cannot, by any means—and I will argue this to my death—mimic soul!

A generated story does not sit in memory to the “writer”. It does not, and cannot, cause an ache within the “writer” in its creation nor distribution. It does not carry the weight of a grandparent’s voice reading aloud in a dim room, nor does it return, years later, to a sentence and and make the “writer” feel differently. It does not cause hesitation, doubt, nor fear, anymore than the “writer” going back to countless rewrites as they unravel and rebuild.

Why? It’s simple, really. It doesn’t care. And neither does the person behind it. And that matters more than we are currently allowing ourselves to believe.

We who create with passion; who pour ourselves from deep within, onto page after page, revealing our fervour through every drop of blood, sweat, and tear that makes itself physically invisible but emotionally evident… we are the ones living with the fear. The fear of being misread or accused. The fear that something we have potentially spent years creating could be dismissed, not for what it is, but for what someone else believes it might be.

But the passion that ignited our desire to write in the first place… that cannot be taken away. The hours hunched over a computer, the sleep lost to a dream, the emotion that is felt by each person who reads what you have built… that cannot be impersonated.

It’s damaging—this idea; this concept of artificial intelligence in the world of publishing. Not just in the repercussions of (possible) accusations, but to our own personal psyche. That’s a part that doesn’t make it to the headlines with each and every topic of conversation on this matter. That the part of ourselves that live within our drafts, is vulnerable, and with each new alleged accusation without proof and circumstance, or with each piece of editing suggestion offering the advice of changing out works because it can be misconstrued… we continue to live in fear and hesitation.

Writers are not just writing anymore. They are, quite literally, having to defend themselves, explain themselves, and prove themselves—not as writers in the sense of talent in storytelling, but as the writer themselves.

We were never meant to have to prove that we are human, though. So where does this leave us? The new writers trying to make it in a space working against us? The authors who have been published, again and again, now facing the same fears?

I don’t think that leaves us in a place of certainty—not by any means. The dream of publishing is already one of enough uncertainty that we do not need more. Though, I do believe this puts us in a position of choice…

We can choose to continue. We can choose to write slowly, to carry deeply, and to resist the pressure to prove our humanity while we draft because it should be evident in the care of our words, and the intensity in which we tell our stories. We can choose to allow our creative vigour to announce itself across the page with each clickity-clack of the keyboard, or scribble of our pens. We can choose to defy the AI-narrative and believe in proper punctuation, grammar, and metaphors without fear shadowing our progress.

We, united, can choose to remember why we began, for the simple, stubborn, and deeply human need to tell a story. And hopefully, maybe, this iwll be the one thing that they will not be able to replicate—the desire, the dream, the passion, and the indisputable ability to just be human.

xx,
Kátia Baptista

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A quick note before you…

I am sorry that this is the reality we find ourselves in . I don’t think any of us imagined a world where writers would feel the need to prove their humanity… or where stories, which have for so long been a reflection of the human condition, would be questioned at their core.

But nevertheless, here we are. And again, all we can do is continue.

Continue to write with desire, to read with anticipation, to discover with hope, and to publish with belief.

I still believe this: when something is real—truly, humanly real—it will show. It will cary something that cannot be replicated no matter how closely it is mimicked by AI. It will linger differently with those who wrote it, and those who read it. It will feel different. And perhaps, in that, there is something to hold on to.

I hope we find our way back to a place where there is no fear in baring ourselves on the page… no hesitation in reading something new… no doubt in loving a story enough to want it held in others’ hands.

I hope we return to a time where passion is not questioned and where creation is not confused with imitation.

To the writers—keep building something beautiful.
To the readers—keep seeking the stories that set something alight within you.
To the literary agents, editors, publishers, and all who work tirelessly behind the scenes to bring out dreams of authorship to fruition—keep believing in writers. Because somewhere, always, there is a story waiting to be written, and a reader waiting to find.

Not the peaceful kind that we often romanticize. Not the quiet the wraps around you like a blanket while the words come easily, while thoughts unfold gently onto the page.

No. I’m referring to a different kind of stillness… the kind that echoes loudly, and subtly aches.

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When I first found Substack, it felt like stepping into something full of promise. A space where words could live freely, and writers and readers moved toward one another, drawn together by shared curiosity and longing. It was described as something almost effortless—writer, and they will come.

A community at reach, a conversation waiting to be had, a place to be seen. And I believed that.

Of course, nothing comes without effort, but I lived with the idea that the effort was putting words to page. So I didn’t believe it in the sense of number or monetization. Or even a growth metrics. These weren’t the things I’d come here for, regardless. I’d come for something more human. Still silent in its own right—nothing flashy, I wasn’t looking to explode or go viral.

I was just searching for connection.

I came here looking for readers who feel the way I do about books. The ones who linger in stories long after the final page. The ones who see history n ot as something distant, but as something still breathing beneath our feet.

I came looking for writers who sit in the same in-between space. The ones building something slowly and carefully, without shortcuts.

I came looking for conversation—the kind that share interest, that share passion, that share ambition and aspiration.

And yet… more often than not, I find myself writing into something that does not answer back.

The posts go up. The words, carefully chosen, sometimes poured out, others wrestled into place, are sent out into the open. And then… nothing.

No conversations to fall into. No interesting exchange of thoughts. No sense that the wrods have landed anywhere at all.

It’s a strange thing, to share something that feels so personal and be met with silence. It’s not rejection, nor criticism, which is so often feared when baring yourself creatively. No, it’s none of that—how could it be when no one is on the other end.

I't’s just… absence. And I think that is what makes it difficult to name. Because writing into the void is not loud in its discouragement. It doesn’t push back in anyway. Instead, it just simply does not respond.

There is, of course, a kind of peace in that. A freedom, even. To write withut expectation, to say what you mean without filtering it through what might be received well. To exist, creatively, without the pressure of performance.

There is something almost sacred in that kind of solitude. But solitude, when stretched too far, begins to shift. It becomes something else, something that somehow feels even quieter than quiet. It feels heavier, and it feels lonelier.

Because we are not only writers—or at least, I would presume that is a fair statement to be made. Because to writer, one must too, read. So we are readers. And both, by nature, reach outward in ways.

We look for connections, for recognition, for a community of others who feel the same or treasure the same things. For that small, almost imperceptibly moment where someone reads something we’ve written and thinkgs “ah yes, I understand this. I feel this, too.”

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So what happens when that moment doesn’t come? What happens when the space that promised conversation begins to feel like a monologue?

I have found myself asking that more than once.

Where are the readers who love historical fiction that way I do? Where are the ones who want to talk about stories that emotionally catapult and reawaken something deep within you? The ones who want to discuss places that feel alive, or the past that refuses to keep itself quiet?

Where are the one who came here, not for algorithms or growth strategies, but for something slower and more meaningful; something real?

Perhaps they are here. Perhaps they are reading quietly, witout responding. Perhaps they are writing into their own corners of the same silence. Or perhaps, this is simply part of it. The part no one speaks about when they talk about building something.

The truth is, writing has always been, for me, something internal. I wrote long before there was a place to share it. Long before there was an audience to consider or long for. I wrote to understand myself. To untangle thoughts, and to give shape to things I could not say out loud.

That part has not changed.
But, something has.

Because once you begin sharing your words, even gently, even without expectations, a hope begins to form. Not for recognition, not for numbers… but for presence. For someone, somewhere, to be there. And when that presence feels absent,it leave behind a kind of ache that is difficult to admit.

So where does that leave us?

Those of uswho are not here to chase virality. Not here to turn every sentence into something optimized for attention and monetary means. Not here for perform—or out-perform.

Where does that leave those of us who are simply here to write? To build community? To meet others who enjoy the same things, or are in the same “boat.”

Maybe it leaves us exactly where we began: within the page. Because even in the absence of response, the act itself remains.

The words still come, the thoughts still take shape, and the meaning still remains.

Maybe that is enough. Or maybe, it isn’t always. Maybe the answer is that it’s both—enough, and not enough, simultaneously. Because writing into the voice is, at once, peaceful and disheartening. It is both freeing an isolating.

It is a reminder of why we began, and a muted question of why we continue.

Yet, here I am…

Still writing, still pressing publish, still sending these words out into the open, to no one in particular, even when I do not know where they will land.

Because somewhere, someone may in fact be reading. Someone may be pausing and feeling similarly; feeling seen, even if they never say so.

If that is true… then maybe this isn’t a void after all. Maybe it is just a softer kind of connection.

xx,
Kátia Baptista

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I think in many ways, I never quite out grew that feeling. Except now, I go looking for stories rather than foil covered chocolates.

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This year, instead of chocolate eggs and woven baskets, I find myself wandering through my shelves and online bookshops on a different kind of hunt. Not for sweetness, but for something a little more lasting.

If Easter is, at its heart, a season of renewal, then perhaps the stories we reach for should reflect that, too. Stories of renewal, of resilience, of lives rebuilt, and that feel like the first breath of spring after a long and forgiving winter.

The only problem is my basket is still looking a little empty. And I have a feeling I’m not meant to fill it alone.

If I’m going to do this properly, I’m going to need a little help—and perhaps adult supervision, because let’s be real: I can’t be trusted to only by one book of each category.

So this is my Easter egg hunts—only, instead of eggs, I’m looking for books. And here’s what I’m hoping to find tucked somewhere between the pages, waiting to be discovered…

𓎥 A story that feels like light returning: One that begins in shadow, but slowly lets the light in. Not all at once, mind you, and certainly not easily.

𓎥 A story that stays: One that doesn’t shout for attention but ends up stealing the spotlight.

𓎥 A story that breaks (and mends): One that hurts, but for a reason. It’s got to ask something of you, and give something back in return.

𓎥 A story you didn’t expect to love: The hesitant pick, because let’s face it—we’ve all got at least one that surprises us.

Now, this is where you come in, my beautiful bookish besties. You’re the parent, and I’m the over-excited child in search of her sweet-treat!

Will you help me fill my basket? 🥹

Because the best stories are rarely found alone. They’re shared; passed along and spoken about in enthusiasm or urgent recommendation.

So tell me what books felt like hope returning. Which ones lingered with you the longest. Share me the stories that both broke and rebuilt you. Yell out the ones you wish more people knew about!

That’s what this season is really about, anyway. Not just renewal, but rediscovery. But in my case, it’s of stories, voices and the way we find out way back to something that feels like light.

I’ll just be sitting here, basket empty, no eggs in sight, until you start dropping your recs.

xx,
Kátia Baptista

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They do not exist in the present anymoore, and yet, they return softly, as though time, for just a moment, has chosen to fold in on itself and let us step back into something we thought we had long since lived.

For me, they often arrive with music. Fado, most often.

Sunday mornings used to begin in the kitchen. Not loud or hurried. It was a kind of stillness that felt intentional, even if I didn’t understand it at the time.

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It was the only time I can remember that television ever being turned off while everyone was awake. My grandmother would move about gently, preparing coffee and toast—a scent of warm bread and butter filling the space before anything else had the chance to. And there, at the head of the table, sat my grandfather.

Book in hand, already somewhere else, and yet entirely present.

I would take my place by the window. Always the same seat on Sunday mornings. Not because I was told to, but because it felt right. Because something about that tight spot allowed e to watch everything at once, too, as he did. The rhythm of the morning, the movements of my grandmother before she was seat, the stillness of my grandmothers, my brother scurrying down the hall, my father quick in tow, and the music just threading itself through it all.

Fado does not demand attention, but it always has it anyway. It envelops itself into your very marrow an draws you close without your even realizing. It linger and it settles, and at some point, it subtly become part of the air.

And so did he, my grandfather.

He was not a man of many words most of the time. He did not fill silence, but rather honoured it. He watched, he listened, he noticed. And in doing so, he taught me something I would only come to understand much later… that presence does not always need to be spoken in order to be felt.

Some of my earliest memories belong to him. To the moment where he read, at times aloud—not to an audience, but to me. To the cadence of his voice carrying the words of Eça de Queiroz, of Fernando Pessoa, of Luis de Camões through roos that felt too small to hold them, and yet somehow did.

I can still hear him. Still see the way he would motion for me as I came down the stairs, inviting me to sit on the arm of chair. No Explanation, no instruction, just beckoning me to come closer.

Of course, I always did.

There were louder moment, too. Moments filled with laughter I only half understood. Conversations between him and my father that carried a rhythm of their own. Afternoons spent in café, or evenings watching football, games of card, and the tending of his garden.

Beneath it all, was him. Moving about his business, as always. Doing the things that brought him pleasure and joy. And always him ,watching, listening, paying attention, loving in ways that did not need to announce themselves.

I remember, too, the walks. We used to do that a lot in the afternoons and evenings back home. Lisbon as I knew it, and Lisbon as he remember it—two cities, layered over one another, coexisting in the same streets.

One evening—I will never forget, and remember as though it were yesterday—after dinner, we walked through Alcântara—his home, his Lisbon. It wasn’t mine in that moment, not really. Mine was somthing different, something inherited through him, but never fully lived in the way he had. And in these moments, we were walking through his memories, rather than the streets as they were in the moment.

He led me to Rua do Cruzeiro in the end—I had been feeling a little low, though, I cannot remember the why of it. It feels irrelevant now, whatever it was—and he told me when I felt that way, I should come there. That I should one of the benches, take a breath, and look out over the lights of the city. At the bridge, the river and the moon. And just… be.

I still do. On the quietest night, when the air feels still enough to hold his memory, I often find myself going back there to breathe. I sit on a bench, or stand on the cobbles, and for a moment, I feel him there beside me as I look out to the Tejo. A hand at my back. A silence filled with something steady and reassuring. Something that doesn’t need words to be understood.

And then, when I am ready, I walk back down the hill, the same way I came. A lot of the time, I find myself detouring after my descend. Past the apartment that once held so much noise of laughter, voices, and the movement of a family that felt endless at the time.

It is quiet now, but the echoes remain.

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Today is not Sunday. And yet, it feels like one. Perhaps it is the Good Friday holiday making it resemble those treasured Sundays—a day of rest and a Holy day, despite my father’s side never having been very religious in nature.

I find myself sitting with memory the way I once sat at that table year ago, quietly, attentively, allowing it to unfold without any interruption. I can still smell the coffee. I can still taste the toast. I can still hear the music. And I can still see him, and the head of the table, book in hand, taking it all in as though he understood something I would only learn much later in life—that these moments, the ones that seem quiet and ordinary; the ones we do not think to hold onto, are the ones that stay with us the most.

Today, I miss him. Not loudly, and not all at once. But in the way he lived.

And so, I listen to fado—this time, Mariza flows through the air, singing Há Uma Música do Povo—and for a moment, it feels as though he is there again, beckoning me, as he often did, to sit beside him, to listen, and to pay attention.

Saudades, avô. Estás sempre comigo, em cada passo da vida. Amo-te tanto como o José Cid diz: Ontem, Hoje, e Amanhã.

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It starts off almost like a second-thought, maybe with a passion mention, a cover reveal, or a whisper across social platforms. And then, slowly, it grows. It ends up settling into your thoughts and lingers. It becomes something you return to, again and again, until the story feels less like something you will read, and more like something you are already waiting to love.

That most recently, for me, was Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi became. For months, it followed me across Instagram’s moments of scrolling and the small pauses in the day where something catches your attention refusing to let go.

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Cleopatra—her name alone carries weight, myth, power, misunderstanding. And the promise of a story that wouold finally step beyond the romanticized narratives that have so often reduced her to the men beside her, or to the overly all-powerful and cruel ruler… well, I wanted her, oh so badly.

Not the legend shaped by others, mind you. But the woman, the Pharaoh, and the mind behind the myth.

And so, the anticipation built. And it built. And then it built some more.

By the time release day arrived, I had already lived with the book in a way that felt strangely familiar. I had imagined what it might be and what it could be. The version of it that had already taken shape in my mind. And perhaps… that was actually my first mistake.

Sometime, when we wait too long for something, we do not meet the story as it is. Instead, we meet the version we have already created in our hands long before our eyes ever meet thepages.

There were things I enjoyed, of course. The story follows the broad stokes o Cleopatra’s life with a clear sense of historical grounding. The writing itself moves easily, almost invitingly, and I found myself appreciating the narrative choice to speak directly to the reader—there’s something intimate about that approach that draws you in even when the story itself feels just slightly out of reach.

Yet, despite all odds and expectations, I still found myself searching for something more. For all its promise of Cleopatra, I felt her slipping through the pages rather than standing firmly within them.

The weight of her rule, her intellect, her political sharpness, these were all softened, often overshadowed by the familiar pull toward her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. And while those relationships are undeniably part of her history, they have never been the whole of her.

I wanted to see her as a strategist and leader. As a queen navigating power in a world that was never built to hold her. Instead, at times, she felt distant from that version of herself. More reactive than commanding, more shaped by others than shaping the world around her. And that,more than anything, left me really conflicted.

There is also something to be said about the scale. A life as expansive as Cleopatra’s which spans politics, war, identity, and legacy, asks for space. And within the span of a single novel (particularly one of only 350-odd pages), muh of that felt condensed. Moments that might have carried weight passed quickly, threads that could have deepened her character felt untouched upon rather than fully explored.

It is not that the story was lacking care. It is that it felt…perhaps rushed through its own potential?

Even despite my afflictions with the novel, I still find myself hesitant to call it a “bad” book. Because, the truth is… it isn’t. It simply wasn’t the book I had been waiting for. And that, I think, is a different kind of disappointment entirely.

Because what do we do with that feeling exactly? When a book is not poorly written, not carelessly constructed, not undeserving of its place on the shelf… but just simply, does not meet us where we had hoped it would?

I think, as readers, we are often taught to measure our experiences in absolutes.
Loved it—5 Star. Didn’t love it. Recommend. Do not recommend.
We list these absolutes as though they are the only thing. But there is space between those things where appreciation and disappointment can exist at the same time, just as much as the basis of enjoyment or non-enjoyment is subjective to the person reading it.

I can admire the research that went into this story. I can respect the narrative choices, even when they did not fully resonate with me. I can recognize that this version of Cleopatra may find exactly the read it was meant for, even while acknowledging that it did not find me in the way I had hoped.

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In the end, the truth is rather simple. Not ever book is meant to meet us where we stand. Not ever book is going to hit every reader in the same way.

Some books may pass through us lightly, while others may linger, or even reshape us entirely. Some, despite all of our anticipations, may just not align with the version of the story we were carrying before we ever turned the first page. Or, perhaps just even with where we currently are sitting as readers—be it emotionally, mentally, or anything else.

And that, I don’t think, is failure. I think it’s merely the nature of reading.

Anticipation is a powerful thing. It builds worlds before the author has the chance to show us theirs. It creates expectations that no story, no matter how carefully written, can fully control. And when those expectations are not met, it does not necessarily mean taht the story that has fallen short.

Sometimes, it’s the distance between what we imagined, and waht was actually there. Sometimes, it’s just where we are in our particular mindsets that either allow us to engage entirely or disengage ourselves from the narratives.

So what do we do next?
We close the book. We sit with the feeling. And eventually, we reach for another.
Because for every story that does not quite find us, there is another waiting quietly on the shelf waiting.

One that will.

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One after another, I picked up books that did not respect my emotional boundaries. Stories that demanded far too much of me, really. That lingered long after I had closed them, and refused—quite selfishly, I might add—to let me remain unaffected.

Frankly, it was exhausting.

I cried more than I would like to admit. I lost sleep. I became deeply attached to people who do not exist. And for that alone, I feel it only fair to say… thes books were wildly inconsiderate.

Because truly, what kind of story leaves you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, heart still tethered to something fictional? What kind of book expects you to feel things?!

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Here’s looking back at the most offending titles of March (or, what I will reluctantly admit were my favourite reads…)

The ones that absolutely ruined me (My reluctant 5 Star Shelf)

This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page
Completely unacceptable. Tender, reflective, and beautiful in ways that crept up on me when I wasn’t prepared. I would like to formally request emotional reimbursement…

Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser
The audacity of this book to take something familiar andmake it feel sharp, layered, and entirely new. I expected intrigue, I did not expect to be invested!

How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women by Zoe Venditozzi & Clare Mitchell (audiobook)
Non-fiction that’s informative, powerful, rage-inducing in the most necessary way. I finished this both enlightened and deeply unsettled—which, frankly, feels like the point so I’m very unhappy…

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
I knew better, I truly did. And yet, I read it anyway. Emotional devastation delivered with precision and I’ve not recovered. How dare the author!

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (audiobook)
Intimate, immersvive, and utterly consuming. It’s the kind of story that doesn’t shout, but lingers in ways that are impossible to ignore. I am, without a doubt, going to have a very serious conversation with Delilah over on Instagram about countlessly recommending this, because what this book has done to me is just unacceptable.

Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall
Ending the month with this one felt like a direct attack. Set here in Toronto where I’m currently perched, it hit too close to home and carries a weight that lignered long after the final page. Bone-chilling in its truth, and now I’m going to have to talk to a book-professional about getting over it.

The less-honourable mentions (the emotionally disruptive 4.5 star reads)

The Names by Florence Knapp
Subtle, layered, unravelling, affecting… It’s the kind of story that settles into you rather than demanding attention—I was really rather hoping for something a little less.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Expansive and deeply human, so not what I was looking for. It’s a story that flows through time and leaves something behind in its wake. I really just wanted something to distract me, not destroy me, so I’m horrified.

Eleanore of Avignon by Elizabeth DeLozier
This was far too atmospheric and immersive, with a historical richness that feels both grounded and haunting. Would not recommend!

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Oh great, another Delilah recommendation—I really must have a chat with her. Yes, I am late to this book-party, and yes, it was worth it, but I didn’t want it to be! So now, I’m just here, upset, because this story was warm, unexpected and profound!

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
I wasn’t looking for a love letter to language, women, nor to the words that history almost forgot. Nor was I looking for an absolutely essential author’s note. But that’s what I got, so now I am outraged.

Oh, and the horrendous 4 stars that were almost 5…

The Baker’s Secret by Lelita Baldock
Quite resistance, and subtle strength… It’s the kind of story that builds rather than overwhelms. Well, jeez…

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
Too much of a compelling blend of espionage and literature, layered with tension and intrigue—I was looking for bland and meh, but instead I got this!

Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray
And just like that, this book has me once again questioning my stance on YA, which is just completely unacceptable.

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Well, despite all of these terribly inconsiderate reading experiences… I find myself already reaching for more.

Need I say the words April Fools’?

These were, by far, anything but my worst reads—not even close. They were magnificent in every sense of the word, and honestly, I cannot stress enough just how wonderful each one truly was.

These stayed with me after I closed the cover, and they’re bound to remain, embedded within my very bookish-soul for a very, very long time.

They’re the ones that left me raw and reflecting. They altered me in ways that only great stories and truths can manage to do. They’re the ones that reminded me why i return, again and again, to books that undo me rather simply entertain me.

I think there’s something wonderfully human in wanting to feel like that. To sit with grief that isn’t yours, or to understand lives you never lived. To hold a space for stories that stretch you capacity for empathy and leave you changed for it.

March may not have respected my emotional boundaries, but I certainly didn’t mind in the slightest—after all, the books I loved and remember best of all are the ones that completely destroy of deeply affect me in one way or another.

So here’s looking ahead to April. We’re on day 1 of birthday month, and the TBR remains, as always, wildly ambitious and mildly threatening in its structural integrity. But there are a few I’m especially hoping to wander into…

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain (yeah, I know, this was on my March TBR)
A Shadow in Moscow by Katherine Reay (yes, this one, too. No need to remind me!)
Mists Over the Channel Island by Sarah Sundin (I get it! Stop reminding me of my March reading failures…)
Daughter of Egypt by Marie Benedict
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (very excited to re-read this with my mini-me!)
I, Medusa by Ayana Gray
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Oh, but why do I keep letting Delilah recommend my…wait, wait—we’ve already established this was an April Fools’ gimmick. Carry on…)
The Hidden Storyteller by Mandy Robotham
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova (adored The Shadow Land by her!)

If March has reminded me of anything, it’s that if being emotionally destroyed by a book is wrong, then my Goodness, I have no interest in ever being right.

Let’s see where April takes me… ✈︎

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Paris—oh, Paris—is one of them. Or at least, that is the illusion it offers so effortlessly.

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The façades are too perfect, the boulevards too intentional, the light too carefully places, almost as thoughthe city itself hadn a hand in curating how it would one day be remembered. And at the centre of that memory, rising above rooftops and riverbanks alike, stands something that feels almost inevitable now…

The Eiffel Tower.

But inevitability is a trick of hindsight, because she was never meant to stay.

I remember the first time I stood beneath her. Not from across the Seine, not framed by postcards or softened by distance, but directly beneath, where the iron rises around you in sweeping arcs, impossibly intricate and impossibly deliberate. It does not feel delicate up close. It feel engineered; intentional and strong. Stoic, even.

There is something grounding about her when you stand there. Something that quiets the noise of the city for just a moment that feels as though you’ve temporarily stepped into the presence of something that has endured more than it eve promised it wouuld.

And perhaps, that is why she feels the way she does. Because she was build in defiance of expectation.

When Gustave Eiffel unveiled his design for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris did not welcome it with open arms. Quite the opposite in fact. Artists, writers, and intellectuals protested fiercely. They called it monstrous. They called it industrial. They called it an intrusion upon the beauty of a city already so deeply rooted in classical elegance. To them, this iron lattice tower was not progress, but instead, it was disruption; a scar against the skyline.

It was never meant to be permanent anyway. The tower was granted a twenty year permit. A temporary structure to be seen as a spectacle for a world’s fair. Something that would rise, astonish, and then just… disappear.

But she (and history, as it so often does) has other plans.

What saved her was not beauty, at least, not at first. It was usefulness. The tower proved invaluable as a radiotelegraph station, particularly in the years that followed. In a world shifting toward modern communication, her height—once criticized—became her greatest asset.

She could carry signals across distance, she could serve, and she could adapt…
And so, she stayed.

There is something deeply poetic aboout that. That what was once rejected for its difference became indispensable because of it. That what was meant to be temporary became permanent not through sentiment, but through purpose. And overtime, perception followed.

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Today, we cannot fathom Paris without her. She is stitched into the city’s identity so completely that to remove her would feel like erasing something essential. She is romance, yes. She is postcards and proposals and golden hour photographs.
But she is also something more; something quiet.

She is endurance. She is the quiet, unwavering presence of something that stood through criticism, through doubt, through time itself and remained… unshaken.

Maybe thatis why I have always loved her. Not just for what she represents now, but for what she once was—misunderstood, unwanted. Temporary.

There is something reassuring in that transformation. In knowing that not everything is recognized for what it is the moment. That sometimes, significance is something that must grow onto itself. That sometimes, what feels out of place is simply ahead of its time.

The last time I saw her, she was lit against the evening sky—golden, steady, appearing impossibly calm against the movement of the city below her where cars moved and people passed, as the Seine carried its reflections quietly through the night.

She remained there, not demanding attention; not asking to be understood. Just standing, exactly where she was always meant to be, even if no one knew it at the time.

There is a kind of comfort in that, I think. Not in grandeur or even spectacle, but i what she represents beneath it all. The idea that something can begin as temporary, uncertain, even as unwelcome, and yet end up still becoming something lasting that is both meaningful and beloved.

The Eiffel Tower doesn’t rush to prove herself, she never has. Instead, she endured. She stood through criticism, through doubt, through the slow reshaping of perception. She’s stood through seasons, through war, through the steady passage of tiem that wear everything down, except, somehow, her.

She is monumental. She is stoic. Unmoved by opinion, unshaken by change. Not untouched by it mind you, but never left undone by it, either.

Maybe that’s why she feels the way she does when you stand beneath her arcs, why she quiets something within you without ever asking to be understood.

On this day, in 1889, she opened to the public for the first time. Visitors climbed her levels, step by step, looked out across Paris, and saw the city from a height it had never offered before. They watched as Paris unfolded beneath them in way unimaginable for the time. Rooftops softened into patterns, the Seine into a ribbon of light. The city itself into something both familiar and entirely new.

It was a new perspective, and maybe—just maybe—that is what she has always given us. Not just a view of Paris, but a way of seeing anew. A reminder that time has a way of reshaping everything, even the things we once thought would never belong. That what is resisted may one day be revered, and that what feels out of place may simply be waiting for the wrold to catch up.

And if Paris (and stories) had taught me anything, it is this… Some places are not only meant to be seen, but to be read. To be wandered through slowly like a novel that lingers. To be understood, not in moments, but in layers; unraveled piece by piece through history, through memory, through the stories that have shaped it long before we arrived.

The Eiffel Tower may rise above a city, but it does not stand apart from it. It belongs to the same narrative, the same rhythm. To the same enduring pulse. And if you cannot stand beneath her just yet… you can still step into Paris another way—through story.

If you’d like to wander Paris through pages instead, these are just some of the ones I find myself returning to. Books that carry the same muted resilience, layered beauty, and same sense of a city that endures—all set beneath her skyline:

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.
A story of resistance and survival in occupied France, where Paris is both a backdrop and witness.

The Room on Rue Amélie by Kristin Harmel
Intimate and human, unfolding wtithin the quiet corners of occupied Paris.

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
Where books, war, and courage intertwine in a city fighting to hold onto itself.

The Postmistress of Paris by Meg Waite Clayton
A story of resistance, art and the fragile threads that connect those who refuse to look away.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
A softer, more intimate Paris, where love and ambition blur beneath the city’s literary glow.

The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff
Where espionage and memory intertwine across the echoes of war.

Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck
A haunting exploration of resistance, courage, and the cost of survival

The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris by Daisy Wood
A reminder that even in the darkest moment, stories and those who protect them, endure.

Paris is not only a place. I came to realize a long time ago that it is a feeling. A memory, even. It is a story that continues to be written, whether in iron and light, or ink and page.

And at its centre, she still stands—La Tour Eiffel. Not as something that demanded to be loved, but as something that endured long enough to become just that. And whether you stand beneath her, or step into her vistas through story, you begin to understand something she has always know…

That endurance does not need to announce itself. It simply remains.

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I don’t mean when it ends, but rather, when it lingers. When it settles so profoundly into your thoughts, reshapes something within you, and makes you wonder about the hands that wrote it, the mind behind the words, and even the life that existed just beyond the margins.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself stepping a little closer to that space; entering into conversations with the writers whose stories have stayed with me long after I’ve turned that final page. And so, it feels only right to give those moments a place of their own here…

This newest thread to the Wandering Pages and Places Substack is one that I am utterly thrilled to introduce—

Welcoming a series rooted in curiosity, conversation, and the quiet unfolding of a story beyond its cover.

Here, we’ll sit down, sometimes quite literally, with some truly wonderful authors. We’ll talk about stories that have shaped their work, the ones that continues to live within then, the even the books you may not know exist, but deserve a place on your shelf (and in your hands)

Some conversations will take us behind the scenes of beloved novels, while others, will introduce you to stories you may not have discovered yet. Along the way, there may even be a few surprises, like bookish giveaways, shared reading moments, and the kind of literary discoveries that feel a little like serendipity.

But more than anything, this series is about connection. Because books may begin as solitary experiences…but they rarely remain that way. Instead, they very often become conversations between reader and writer, between story and memory, and, in my personal opinion, between one life and another.

But this—my upcoming Between The Pages series—this is where those conversations will live.

So pull up a chair, there’ll be a seat waiting for you between the pages.

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Not anger at Orwell’s words. But at the world that makes his warning feel less like history and more like prophecy.

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It begins so simply: animals, tired of neglect and cruelty, rise against their human master and establish a society built on equality. Their voices join in revolution, their hopes ignite, their future feels unbound. For a moment, you believe with them.

But Orwell is merciless. He does not allow the dream to last long. Slowly, insidiously, the promise of equality corrodes. Power consolidates. Language shifts. The rules bend. And before long, the farm looks no different than it did before—except for the faces at the top of the hierarchy.

What chills me, every time, is how familiar it feels. How quickly noble ideals curdle into tyranny. How easily we are convinced to accept the erosion of freedom if it is framed as protection, as progress, as necessity.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The line still feels like a punch to the gut. It is not merely satire. It is scripture, repeated across decades, across governments, across headlines.

Orwell does not just tell a fable. He lays bare the endless cycle: revolution born of hope → power seized in good faith → ideals corrupted → tyranny reborn.

And the working class; the sheep, the horses, the hens, are lulled into acceptance, convinced they are content, convinced their sacrifices are noble, even as they are stripped of agency. Their labour fuels the farm. Their faith sustains the lie. Their silence ensures it continues.

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Does this not sound familiar?

We trade one ruling face for another, one party for another, one slogan for another. And yet the same inequalities remain. The same manipulations persist. The same empty promises of equality echo in speeches while reality sharpens its teeth.

Orwell’s brilliance was not in predicting the future—this already was all too much a reality when written. It was in seeing humanity clearly—our weakness for power, our ease with complacency, our willingness to believe the script if it spares us from the burden of questioning.

Reading Animal Farm in 2026 is like holding a mirror too close to the face. Uncomfortably close.

We are watching books banned in school libraries, voices silenced under the guise of morality, truth rewritten to fit convenient narratives. We are witnessing leaders speak of balance and equality while consolidating their own power. We are watching ambition turn to greed, and greed cloaks itself in righteousness.

And we, the public, are so often the sheep; repeating what we are told, mistaking slogans for substance, accepting the illusion of progress because to challenge it would be too exhausting, too dangerous, too costly.

The farm is not fiction. The farm is here. And we are the animals within it.

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Each reread leaves me unsettled, but this time—this time—it left me burning. Because what Orwell intended as allegory during a time of distraught totalitarianism and fascist behaviour, we continue to live as reality.

How many times must we be warned before we learn? How many cycles of hope and corruption must we endure before we break the pattern? How many more times must we accept that equality is promised but never delivered?

I temper my anger daily, reducing it from a boil to a simmer, but Orwell stirs it back to life. His novella refuses to let me look away. And maybe that’s the point: we are not meant to be comfortable.

Animal Farm is not merely a book. It is a warning. A lesson. A mirror held to humanity at its most self-destructive.

What Orwell captured in so few pages is not bound by time. Power does not vanish; it mutates. Truth does not disappear; it is rewritten. Freedom does not collapse overnight; it is eroded, quietly, piece by piece, until one day we wake to find ourselves back where we began—looking up at new masters who look suspiciously like the old.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

The words should haunt us. Because if we stop hearing their echo, if we stop guarding against their return, we will once again become the sheep, the horses, the hens—faithful, hardworking, complicit in our own undoing.

So I find myself asking, as I close the book yet again:

Has history taught us nothing?
Or have we simply stopped listening?

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What started as a simple “On This Day” note here on Substack turned, quite predictably, into a quiet spiral. A few searches here, a couple of tabs there, and I suddenly found myself deep in the kind of early-morning research rabbit hole that feels less like reading, and more like chasing something just out of resch.

Because here’s the thing. I may not be the most devout Catholic—far from it, if I’m being honest—but seventy thousand people gathering in 1917 to witness a miracle? Well… that, in itself, feels like a kind of miracle in 1917…

And like most things rooted in Portugal, this one begins quietly. With a girl.

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Her name was Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos, born on 28th March 1907 in Aljustrel, a small hamlet near Fátima, where life moved wiht the rhythm of seasons rather than spectacle. Fields stretched wide, sheep gazed under watchful eyes, and days passed in a king of unremarkable stillness.

It’s important to remember that nothing about this place suggested what it would become. Or at least, not yet, anyway.

In 1917, Lúcia was 10 years old. She spent her days tending sheep alongside her younger cousins, Francisco and Jactina Marto. As children of the countryside, they were observant, imaginative, and shaped by a world where faith was not abstract, but rather, it was lived.

Then, on 13th May 1917, something happened in a place called Cova da Iria. They would later say it was a lady—a woman “brighter than the sun,” standing above a small holm oak tree—and she spoke to them. Asked the to return, once a month, on the thirteenth day. And so, they did.

June.
July.
August—though, this was interrupted when thechildren were detained by local authorities who feared unrest, or worse…fabrication.
September.
October.

Esach time, the children returned to the same patch of earth, and each time, more people followed.

Why? That’s easy. Because word travels quickly when it carries the possibility of the divine.

By the tie October arrived, Fátima was no longer quiet. It has instead become a place people moved toward; drawn by curiosity, by faith, by doubt, and by hope.

Some came to witness, while other came to disapprove. Some came simply because other had come before them. And on 13th October, 1917, under heavy rain and a sky that refused to promise anything at all, tens of thousands gather in that field. What happened next, would be called the “Miracle of the Sun.”

Accounts vary, as they often do when something extraordinary is witnessed by many eyes at once. But here’s the thing… there are consistencies. The clouds parts, the rain stopped, and the sun is said to have appeared to move. To spin and cast colours across the crown, to descent, as though falling toward the earth, before turning to its place in the sky.

Some saw it clearly. Some saw nothing at all. Others saw something they could not explain. But, all of them stood in the same field. And that, perhaps, is where the story truly begins. Because whether one believes in miracles or not, an estimated seventy thousand people standing together, looking upward in shared expectation… is its own kind of phenomenon.

And at the centre of it all was a girl who would caryy the weight of that moment for the rest of her.

Her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta however, would not. Both fell victim to the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe between 1918 and 1920. Children, taken too soon, their role in the story preserved in stillness.

But Lúcia remained. And she entered a religious life. First as a Dorothean sister, and later as a Carmelite nun, living much of her life in seclusion. It was she who documented the events on 1917. She who recorded the messages she believed has been entrusted to her; messsages, that would come to be known as the Secrets of Fátima. Through her writing, the story endured. And through endurance, Fátima changed…

I remember it as a place of long drives and quiet anticipation. My grandfather at the wheel, my grandmother beside him, already somewhere else entirely mentally and spiritually long before we even arrived. She was very religious. And when I say very, I mean the kind of devotion that transforms a place into something sacred before you even step foot in it.

We went to Fátima every year that I can remember until my grandfather passed away in 1996. And as a child—three, four, five, six—that experience felt… daunting. Vast. A little overwhelming in a way I didn’t yet have the language for. But memory has a way of softening things.

Now, when I think of or visit Fátima, I don’t think of obligation or confusion. I think of her. Of the quiet reverence she carried, ad of the way a place can mean everything to one person, and something entirely different to another. And somewhere within the memory—whether I believe it or not—was Lúcia.

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If Fátima (the city) could speak, I imagine it would not speak loudly. It would not try to convince you, but instead, it would simply remember.

It would remember a field before it became a destination. A tree before it became a symbol. Three children before they became—or one in particular—became something more.

It would remember the first footsteps, then the second, then the thousand that followed. It would remember the rain that morning in October, and the weight fo it. The way it clung to coats and earth alike. Then, perhaps, it would remember the moment everything shifted.

Not because the sun moved, but because people believed that it had. Sometimes, belief is the thing that transforms a place. Not the event itself, but the way it is carried forward.

Today, Fátima stands as one of the most significant pilgrimage sites in the Catholic world. Millions visits each year, drawn by something that began with three children, and a story that refuses to fade.

Whether you arrive with faith, with doubt, or with curiosity, the place remains—still; watchful. Holding a moment in time that continues to ripple outward. And at its centre, always, is a girl.

A girl born on 28th March, 1907, in a small village. Whose voice carried further than anyone, perhaps even including herself, could ever have imagined.

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What sort of creative expressionist would I be if not one entranced by the fable or legend that created Fátima’s mark in the Catholic-world with Lúcia and her cousins?

As someone drawn to story, and creating it—not a very good one, I’d imagine.

So, as a small creative release… and because I did mention earlier that “If Fátima could speak”… Let’s give her a voice then, shall we?

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Not gently moved, mind you. Not quietly stirred. But completely and utterly undone. The kind of undone that leaves you sitting in silence long after the final page. The king that has you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, heart still tethered to a story that is no longer unfolding, yet somehow still very much alive inside you.

It has been, in every sense, a remarkable and satisfying reading year so far, despite still being the first quarter of the year. There have been books I’ve enjoyed, books I’ve admired, books I’ve recommended without hesitation. But the ones that have stayed, and the ones that have rooted themselves somewhere deeper within in me, are the ones that absolutely broke me.

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And I mean that in the most reverent way possible.

Because there is a particular kind of reading experience that cannot be manufactured; it cannot be forced. It’s one that arrived quietly, sometimes without warning, and before you realize what is happening, you are no longer observing the story. Instead, you are inside of it. You’re living it, carrying it, hurting with it.

This year, that feeling found me early.

it found me in My Name is Hanna by Tara Lynn Masih, where identity, survival, and the quiet endurance of a young girl unfolded with a kind of tenderness that made the weight of history feel immediate and personal.

It found me again in The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton, where children on the brink of disappearance were given a fragile thread of hope, and every page carried the unbearable tension of what might be lost.

And then, as if I hadn’t yet learned my lesson, I returned to A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. A re-read, as though I didn’t already know what it would do to me. As though I’d forogtten the depth of its ache.

It certainly did not soften with familiarity. If anything, it actually cut deeper. Because this time, I saw more. I understood more. And the layered, relentless, and deeply human grief embedded in the story, it settled somewhere it hadn’t the first time.

Some stories don’t lesson with time, instead, they deepen. Others arrive ever so unexpectedly, slipping past whatever quiet defences you thought you had in place.

As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh was one of those. A story that feels almost suspended between reality and imagination, yet rooted so firmlyin the emotional devastation of war that it leaves you breathless.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters did something quieter, but no less powerful. It lingered; it settled into the spaces between thougths, returning days later with the same insistence. A reminder that grief does not always arrive loudly, instead, it often unfold slowly and stays.

And then, there are the books that feel like they’re peeling something back inside you as you read them.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is one of those stories. How it took me so long to discover this is still ravelling me, in honesty. It’s precise, it’s restrained, and it’s devastating in a way that feels almost clinical… until suddenly, it isn’t. Suddenly, it lands, fully, and you are left holding somethingyou cannot easily set down.

Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson did something similar, though through a different lens. It broke me open with its scope, its humanity, its insistence that one life; one choice, can ripple outward in ways we cannot begin to measure.

Then, of course, there are the stories the feel deeply personal, even when they are not your own.

The Children of Zagreb by Lelita Baldock. The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. Each one of these left its mark differently, but all of them asked the same thing of me: to feel, without resistance.

Even Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, which unfolds more quietly, more introspectively, carried that same emotional weight. A reminder that devastation does not always arrive in grand gestures. It can come in stillness, in reflection, in the slow unravelling of something deeply human.

And perhaps what surprised me most this year is how varied that emotional breaking can be.

James by Percival Everett reframes something familiar and forces you to look at it differently. The Names by Florence Knapp and This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page carry their own forms of ache. Subtler, perhaps, but no less affecting.

Even Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall found its way into that space. Because heartbreak in literature is not always about tragedy in the traditional sense, although there is plenty of that here. Sometimes, it is about recognition, and about seeing something clearly, albeit late.

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So, why do we seek this out? Why do we return, again and again, to stories that we know will undo us?

I’ve thought about this more than once over the years. It would be easy to say we read for escape. And it is true, we certainly do. But these books—the ones that leave us hollowed and tender—they do the opposite of escape.

I think they bring us closer.

Closer to grief we have not lived.
Closer to histories we did not experience.
Closer to people we might never have otherwise understood.

They offer us a space to feel deeply, without consequence. To sit inside heartbreak, betrayal, loss, and resilience, knowing that while the emotions are real, the danger is not our to carry beyond the page.

There is a kind of catharsis in that, I think. A quiet permission to feel everything at once. To cry without explanation, or to grieve something fictional as though it were not. To hold a character so close that their pain feels indistinguishable from our own, if only for a moment.

And in that, something shifts ever so slightly. Because these stories… they are not about misery, not really anyway. They are about endurance. They’re about humanity, and the fragile, stubborn persistence of hope in places where it has no right to exist.

They remind us that even in ruin, there is tenderness. That even in loss, there is connection. That even in the darkest chapters, something remains worth holding onto. And perhaps, that is why i am grateful.

I’m grateful for the stories that broke me. Grateful for the ones that left me raw and reflective and, at times, completely destroyed. Grateful for the tears, the silence, the weight that lingered long after turning the final page whilst I stared solemnly at the cover.

Because those are the stories that stay. They’re the ones that do not simply pass through you, but shape something within you. They’re the ones you hold on to, and will always remember—even, if just in pieces.

Eight-five days into this year, and my love for emotional destruction has not changed from so many years prior. I do not want to read only what is easy, I want to read what is honest. What is human, and what leaves a mark. And if that means being broken many more times before the year is through…

Well, then I will gladly turn the page, each and every time, until my heart is torn bare from my chest; until the beauty beneath the sorrow has fully formed.

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I don’t mean that in the sweeping kind of history that fills textbooks or claims entire chapters, but rather in the smaller things; in the moments that seem almost incidental until they’re not. The things that become a discovery made, a life begun, a decision taken that, somewhere along the way, shifted the world ever so slightly on its axis.

Over the past few months, I have found myself starting my days with exactly that.

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Tidbits of history have become a page torn gentle from a small desk calendar gifted to my this past Christmas—On This Day in History. Each morning, before the coffee I’ve made cools, and before words begin to gather on the page in front of me… before my day kicks-off full-gear, I read a single entry. Just a line, a name, a moment, a quiet echo from antoher time. And somehow, it lingers.

It lingers in the way I move through the day. In the way I think about time, not as something distant and fixed, but as something layered, alive, and always in conversation with the present.

Because here’s the thing… history is not only found in grand narratives. It exists in fragments and overlooked details. It exists in the quiet accumulation of moments that, together, shape the world we now inhabit.

So, after 83 days of pulling pages and shedding light on a new historical fact, I’ve decided to begin something new here. A small, ongoing series of notes titled “On This Day…”—a daily (or nearly daily) ritual of sharing these fragments with you. Sometimes, it may be inspiring, or surprising. Sometimes, simply curious.

We’ll find that out together, as each new day passes. But one thing is for certain. No matter the inspiring person, or the remarkable fact, each tidbit discovered will be a reminder that the past is never as far away as it seems.

Think of these as little historical postcards. Moments to pause with, to carry with you, and to let settle, just slightly, beneath the surface of an otherwise ordinary day.

Perhaps in time, we’ll wander a little deeper into specific places or stories. But for now, we begin here.

Because on this day… we remember.

xx,
Kátia Baptista

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The difference is subtle at first. It’s not always found in landmarks or itineraries, but in the feeling that lingers as you walk their streets. A sense that something has been written here long before you arrived. That the walls have listened, the cafés have witnessed, and the air itself hums with language.

Some cities carry literature the way others carry weather. They are quiet, constant, and shape everything around them. And for those of us who read the world as much as we walk through it, these places feel like home long before we ever set foot in them.

Or even, long after we’ve left.

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Edinburgh, for example, is one of those cities.

There is something about the way it rises, stone stacked upon stone, with history pressed into every close and corner, that feels almost constructed from story itself. It is, after all, an UNESCO City of Literature, but even without the title, you would know. You would feel it in the hush of its winding alleys, in the silhouette of its castle against a sky that always seems on the verge of turning dramatic.

It is a city where ghosts and words coexist.

Perhaps that is why it gave us writers who understood how to walk the line between reality and imagination so effortlessly. You can almost see the shadows of Robert Louis Stevenson drifting through the Old Town, or feel the echoes of J.K. Rowling scribbling in a café while the world of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone quietly started to come to life.

But if you cannot wander its closes just yet, you can step into its spirit through story. A novel like The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry pull you into the grit and tension of nineteenth-century Edinburgh, where medicine and morality collide beneath gaslit skies.

Dublin, too, feels like a city built from sentences. Not grand ones, necessarily, but layered ones. Lived-in, weathered, and deeply human, there is a rhythm to Dublin that feels almost conversational. As though the city itself is telling you a story and pausing now and then, to see if you’re still listening.

It’s impossible to speak of Dublin without feeling the presence of James Joyce, whose Ulysses turned a single day into an entire universe. Or Sally Rooney, whose quiet, aching observations of modern life echo through its streets just as vividly.

But for something that bridges past and present, I often find myself returning to The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, where Dublin during the 1918 flu pandemic becomes both intimate and immense, its humanity laid bare in the smallest of rooms.

Paris, of course, needs no introduction.

It is perhaps the most romanticized literary city in the world, and yet, somehow, it still earns it. There is a reason so many writers have passed through Paris and left changed by it. The light alone feels like it belongs on a page.

Here, literature spills out onto sidewalks and lingers in the corners of bookshops that feel older than memory. You can almost hear the murmurs of Ernest Hemingway at a cafétable, or imagine Simone de Beauvoir watching the world with sharp, observant eyes.

But Paris is not only romance. it is resilience, too. Novels like The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles peel back the beauty to reveal the weight of occupation, survival, and quiet resistance. They remind us that even the most beautiful places carry shadows, and that those shadows are part of what makes them unforgettable.

And then there’s Lisbon—my Lisbon.

Lisbon is both a place that feels like story, and one that feels like memory. A place where light and melancholy exist side by side, where the Tejo stretches like a sentence that never quite ends, and where every street seems to hold a fragment of something that once simply was. It is impossible to separate Lisbon from its literary soul, because its writers did not simply describe it, they dissolved into it.

Fernando Pessoa did not write Lisbon; he became it. Through works like The Book of Disquiet, the city tranforms into something internal, reflective, and almost dreamlike. In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago gives us a Lisbon that feels suspended between time and thought, where history presses quietly against every step.

Lisbon is not a city you rush, but one that you feel your way through, much like a novel that refuses to be read quickly.

Prague carries a different kind of literary weight.

There is something almost otherworldly about it. A sense that the city exists slightly out of step with time, as though it belong equally to the past and to something imagined,

It is no surprise that Franz Kafka once walked its streets. His presence lingers in the architecture, in the strange and beautiful tension that defines the city. Prague does not simply invite you in, but rather, it unsettles you just enough to make you look again; look closer.

To read The Trial by Kafka is to feel that disquiet, that sense of being caught inside something larger and less easily explained.

But Prague is not only surreal. It is also steeped in history that refuses to be forgotten. The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow threads together music, memory, and war, capturing a city shaped as much by loss as by beauty.

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And perhaps, that is the thread that connects all of these palces. Not just literature, but memory.

Because these cities with literary souls do not merely exist as destinations. They exist as layers of voicces, stories, and history that continue to echo long after the final page is turned. And the truth is, you do not need a plane ticket to visit them—to experience them.

You can step into Edinburgh through fog and ink. Into Dublin through conversation and quiet longing. Into Paris through love and resistance. Into Lisbon through saudade and sunshine. Into Prague through shadow and dream.

Books have always been our most faithful passports. They ask nothing of us but time. And in return, they offer entire worlds.

So if you find yourself longing for somewhere new, but unable to go… reach for a story instead. You may arrive somewhere you never expected.

And if you’re anything like me, you’ll find that some cities… you never really leave. Or rather, a part of you stays behind. Be it by way of the page, or by exploring their corridors and closes.

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I’m not entirely sure who decided this, or where it is officially celebrated, but the moment I stumbled across it I felt an immediate and very personal sense of recognition.

Because here’s the thing… Hello—this word defines me.
Bibliomania is defined as an intense enthusiasm for collecting and possessing books, and if I’d have to guess, it’s a condition I suspect many of us share.

Not casually, but passionately. Maybe even a little irresponsibly?

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Now, I would like to begin by saying that I am a reader. A very serious reader, a dedicated reader. A person who spends an unreasonable amount of time wth her nose buried in a book. (wait… is there such a thing as an unreasonable amount of time reading?)

But with that being said, if we are being entirely honest here… reading books and buying books are two very, entirely, different hobbies.
And I appear to have mastered both.

Across three different homes, my books have quietly (or not quietly if you ask my family)taken over more space than i ever intended to give them. Shelves line the wall. Stack form on tables and window sills. A few optimistic towers sit beside beds and armchairs waiting patiently for their moments. Or perhaps not so patiently—I’m pretty sure each unread title in my piles is cursing me beneath their non-breaths.

My shelves are currently bursting at the seams, though they remain stoically silent about it. The towering TO BE READ pile, however, is a different story entirely. That stands tall, and slightly threatening. Every time I place a new book on top, there is a brief moment where the laws of physics seem to hold their breaths.

I gently set the book down, step back, and say a small prayer. And just for good measure, I tap my heels three times and whisper quietly, please don’t collapse!

But honestly, I suspect it’s really only a matter of time.

Book lovers often like to pretend that their towering TBR piles are manageable, and that they’re “catching up.” That someday, with discipline and careful planning, they will reach the bottom of their stacks.

I admire the optimism. Truly, I do. Personally, I abandoned that illusion years ago when I came to the sad realization that unless the publishing industry took a mini-break in order for me to catch up and read absolutely everything already published that I still want to read… Well, then I’ll likely never see the end of that TBR list in this lifetime. (Maybe the next?)

I realized a truth hidden between my physical TBR, though. And that’s the reality that buying books is not simply about reading the all. It’s kind of the possibility of it.

A book purchased is a promise; a quiet agreement with your future self that someday—maybe next week, maybe next year—you will step into the world waiting inside those pages.

Every spine on a shelf represents a door that has yet to be opened. And sometimes the joy lies simply knowing that that door exists.

Of course, there are practical complications to this lifestyle. Books have a habit of multiplying when left unattended. One moment you own a modest collection. The next, you are rearranging furniture to make room for “just one more bookshelf.”

Then, there is a moment when someone visits your home for the first time and pauses to examine your walls of books. They tilt their head, squint slightly, and ask the inevitable question: “Have you read all of these?”

To which any experience bibliomaniac knows that there are several acceptable responses.
a) You can answer honestly, which is risky.
b) You can answer vaguely, which is safer, or
c) You can simply laugh and change the subject…

Because bibliomania is not about completion, instead, it is about love.

Love of stories, love of ideas, love of the physical object itself—the feel of paper, the smell of ink on pages, the weight of a story, and the quiet promise of a first page waiting to be turned.

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Books have alwasy been more than the words they contain. They are companions and memories. They are souvenirs from different versions of ourselves.

The book you bought during a rainy holiday. The novel you read during a sleepless night. The battered paperback that somehow survived three different moves and still refuses to leave your shelf.

A home filled with books is not clutter—Sorry, Marie Kondo, you said I only need to get rid of the things that don’t bring me joy, right?—it’s evidence of curiosity or imagination. Of a life spent wandering through worlds both real and imagined.

So, if your shelves are overflowing, if your nightstand hosts a precarious stack of unread novels, if your TBR pile could reasonably qualify as a piece of modern architecture… Hey, I’m right there with you!

Take comfort in knowing that you are not alone. Bibliomania, it seems, is alive and well—perhaps more healthy than ever! So, though belated, we might as well celebrate it. (C’mon, lemme see what you’re working with. This is my official request; my plea, for your shelfies! Solicited, I swear.) Preferably by buying another book.

After all, the TBR Tower seems stable enough. At least for now.

And if not? Well, as a self-declared book-engineered, that obviously means it just needs a little more reinforcement in its structure—which just means you need a few more books around the bottom to ensure it stays up right.

xx,
Kátia
Your Fellow Bibliomaniac

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Not because it’s my favourite season—as that honour belongs to summer, with its ravenous sunshine and unapologetic warmth—but because spring feels like an exhale. It’s the season of anticipation, the promise that the bitter edges of winter are loosening their grip, and the quiet reassurance that warmth is on its way.

Every season gives us reason to celebrate in its own form. Autumn wit its golden melancholy, winter with its hush and hearth. Summer with its blaze and abandon. But spring… spring is different. Spring carries hope.

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As daylight stretches longer into the evening and the temperature shifts from frigid to merely brisk, something subtle begins to change. Frost encrusted soils gives way to seedling, branches once skeletal begin to soften with buds, and perennial flowers push stubbornly through the earth like small acts of rebellion.

And with with, I think we ourselves change, too.

After months of bundling ourselves against wind and grey skies, we begin to reemerge. We open windows, or linger outdoors. We find ourselves walking a little slower, looking up a little more often. Much like the animals who retreat during winter’s harshest months, we too, have a way of hibernating—socially, emotionally, even. creatively. Spring become a kind of rebirth; a return to ourselves.

And if you’re a mood reader, as I often find myself to be, spring does not only alter your wardrobe or your routines, it also alters your shelves.

Covers adorned with flowers or birds seem to call a little louder during spring. Stories that promise light at the end of a dark tunnel catch my attention more quickly. Themes of renewal, resilience, and starting over feel especially resonant when nature itself is beginning again. Even the physical act of holding a book feel different when the sun filters through the window instead of bouncing off the snow.

In spring, I often reach for stories that stretch toward hope. That doesn’t mean they are light necessarily; history rarely is. But there is something about this season that makes me crave narratives where growth follows hardship, and characters rebuild. Where survival is not the end of the story, but the beginning of something new.

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Some books I find myself returning to or longing to step into as the first day or spring arrives, are those that hold both weight and warmth.

I can already picture myself dining quietly at the Metropol in A Gentleman in Moscow, living alongside Alexander Rostov as the world shifts outside his window. There is something about that novel that feels especially fitting for a season of slow thaw. Perhaps it’s its patience or its endurance, but whatever the reason, it has already felt like a springtime read for me.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society carries the same gentle resilience. Community stitched together in the aftermath of occupation, and friendships blooming where darkness once lingered.

Then there are stories that hold grief and growth in equal measures. Remarkably Bright Creatures is certainly one; where unexpected connections soften loneliness. Or The Four Winds, where survival in the face of hardship becomes its own quiet heroism.

Spring doesnt’t shy away from difficulty, it simply insists that life continues. A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, both traverse decades and displacement, reminding me that renewal is not always tidy, instead, it is often born of sacrifice and courage. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn is another that remains one of those books I return to when I need to remember what resilience truly looks like.

And then there are stories that feel like an open window on a warm spring day, feeling whimsical, adventurous and quietly romantic all at the same time. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune is one I will never tire of recommending when someone needs softness. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim feels practically designed for spring—Portofino sunshine, women stepping into themselves, and transformation blooming alongside wisteria… need I say more?

The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton offers its own irreverent charm. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus brings sharp wit and defiance to the table. West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge carries a sense of journey and wonder that feels expansive in the way spring should, and does. While Ship of Dreams by Donna Jones Alward

I’m also drawn toward stories rooted in art and observation. The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean comes to mind when I consider this. Much like Nineteen Steps by Millie Bobby Brown does when I search for a story that holds the promise of personal reclamation.

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It is a blessed thing that spring stretches all the way into June, because there are simply too many books whispering to be read during this season of budding flowers and longer evenings. Some will be re-reads—because who can truly resist the call to an old favourite?—and others will be entirely new journeys waiting to unfold.

As most of your know—or, if you’re new here, you’ll soon discover—I gravitate toward historical fiction nearly 90% of the time; it is my first literary love as an adult. Its ability to transport me to another era, to merge emotional storytellings with factual scaffolding… well frankly, it feels like stepping into a time machine.

If I could, I would travel backward through every decade, every century that fascinated me. I would stand at the edges of pivotal moment and witness revolutions, heartbreaks, quiet domestic evenings, grand political upheavals for even just a mere moment. But for now, that travel remains confined to pages.

And perhaps that is enough.

This spring, you may find me seated beside Alexander Rostov beneath chandelier and candlelight. or wandering Portofino hand-in-hand with four women rediscovering themselves. Perhaps I’ll be reinventing myself along with Louisa after tragedy struck the Atlantic, standing alongside Sunja in early twentieth-century Japan, or uncovering truths in unexpected companionship between Tova and Marcellus.

Wherever I find myself this spring, one thing is certain: I will be living within story.

Because spring is not only about stepping outside. It is abut stepping forward, into light, into growth, and into the next chapter.

The shelves shift with the season, the sunlight lingers a little longer, and the world often softens at the edges.

And so do we.

If you need me this spring, you’ll likely find me with windows cracked open, sunlight spilling across the pages, nose deep in a book. And I’ll be living alongside a character who reminds me that even after the harshest winter, something always blooms.