Nicole Abadie

how much it really shows how much these, both of these characters in these books really loved their mothers and they were very gentle, compassionate, good men.

And to me, this was a real antidote to that whole concept of toxic masculinity, which other writers have touched on this year.

This for me was a real antidote and it made me think as I read these that there's hope for the future if there's young men out there like this.

It's highly emotional.

I think it's a wonderful book.

I loved it and I do see real parallels between those two.

I really love the silence of the girls as well.

And I think what was particularly clever about that, it was for the first time it portrayed the Trojan War from a woman's point of view.

And you read it and you read what happened to these women and...

their fate.

And I think we've all thought a lot about young men and men who go off to war and what happens to them, but we haven't thought a lot before about what it's like for the women.

And this is a very, it's just a fantastic portrayal from that perspective.

Yes.

Another book that I really loved this year was The Great Believers by Rebecca Mackay.

It's her third novel.

I hadn't read the other two.

This is set in Chicago in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis.

And it follows a group of young men who we meet in the beginning, all in the prime of their life.

They're beautiful.

They're clever.