Published By: Canongate
Pages: 256
Released On: 12/02/2026
Mr Burman is unmoored. Still reckoning with the death of his wife Ada, and struggling to understand his grown-up daughter Leila, he finds himself on a train to London, at the invitation of the police.
He is to meet Raf, a young man suspected of trying to blow up St Paul’s cathedral – and a man once intimately connected with the Burman family. Have the police laid a trap?
This novel follows Mr Burman’s journey towards the mystery of a radical act and into the true nature of his own family. It asks what a person leaves behind when they’ve gone, and how much of the past we can carry with us into the future.
*****
This was my first James Meek book and so I had no expectations coming into it.
I am someone who loves short chapters, which is where this falls short. It doesn’t have chapters as such, instead just very long sections. That’s not a negative on the book as such, more a personal preference, but I struggled with that aspect.
I couldn’t stand Leila. My heart went out to Mr. Burnam. Yes he could be a bit of a wet weekend at times but he was trying; he’d been through a lot and he just wanted to regain some sort of relationship with his daughter, but Leila was so shut off and rude that I didn’t like reading about her.
We never find out Mr Burnam’s first name, and it gives him a bit of distance. It’s quite impersonal, and so whilst I did like him as a character, there’s not much to get hold of, like he’s keeping us at arms length. Raf is a bit of light relief. He’s not necessarily a “goodie” or “baddie”, but he has his moments. And even if his actions are a bit wrong, he really shines off the page.
It’s an interesting look at grief. It’s not an overly sad or morose book, and it’s not a book about grief as such. But both Mr Burnam and Leila have been bereaved and it was interesting to read the effects of it.
It is set over a short period of time, just a few days, which could have been restricting, and I’m on the fence a bit. It does give us more of the emotional side of the story rather than if it was a full-on action piece, but at the same time, the middle of the book sagged a little.
My main issue was with the language used. It reads as if James was more focussed on ensuring every sentence was a beautiful and poetical as possible, without really thinking about it impacted the whole story and it came to be a bit…poncy.
A lot of other reviews I’ve seen compared it to this previous work, calling it a “flawed return”. Now, having not read any of his others I can’t comment on that. But I can agree that it isn’t perfect, it is a bit rough around the edges. But overall I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read as opposed to an entertaining and enjoyable one.
Books By Your Bedside 