Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The theme this month is New, interpreted as you wish: new releases, recent acquisitions, “new” in the title, etc, new-to-you books, new additions to your TBR list, recently published books, or something else that you connect with the word ‘New’.

These books are all fairly recent acquisitions, new-to-me and are books I haven’t read. The links go to the descriptions on Amazon.

J is for Jamie Oliver’s Christmas Cookbook 

With classic recipes for every part of Christmas dinner, veggie alternatives, clever ways to use up all of those leftovers, top tips for cooking meat perfectly, and even recipes for edible gifts and Christmas cocktails – he really has thought of everything!

A is for Angels and Insects by A S Byatt

Like A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.

N is for The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

Midsummer 2017: teenage mum Tallulah heads out on a date, leaving her baby son at home with her mother, Kim.

At 11 p.m. she sends her mum a text message. At 4.30 a.m. Kim awakens to discover that Tallulah has not come home.

Friends tell her that Tallulah was last seen heading to a pool party at a house in the woods nearby called Dark Place.

Tallulah never returns.

2018: walking in the woods behind the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started as a head teacher, Sophie sees a sign nailed to a fence.

A sign that says: DIG HERE . . .

U is for Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane’s long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.

A is for The Age of Diagnosis: Are Medical Labels Doing Us More Harm Than Good? by Suzanne O’Sullivan

Mental health categories are shifting and expanding all the time, radically altering what we consider to be ‘normal’.

Genetic tests can now detect pathologies decades before people experience symptoms, and sometimes before they’re even born.

And increased health screening draws more and more people into believing they are unwell.

An accurate diagnosis can bring greater understanding and of course improved treatment. But many diagnoses aren’t as definitive as we think. And in some cases they risk turning healthy people into patients.

Drawing on the stories of real people, as well as decades of clinical practice and the latest medical research, Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan overturns long held assumptions and reframes how we think about illness and health.

R is for Redhead by the Side of the Road by Ann Tyler

A perfect love story for imperfect people

Micah Mortimer measures out his days running errands for work, maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7:15, every morning). He is in a long-term relationship with his woman friend Cassia, but they live apart. His carefully calibrated life is regular, steady, balanced.

But then the order of things starts to tilt. Cassia is threatened with eviction, and when a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son, he is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle.

Can Micah, a man to whom those around him always seem just out of reach, find a way back to his perfectly imperfect love story?

Y is for The Years by Virginia Woolf.

The Years follows the lives of the Pargiters, a large middle-class London family, from an uncertain spring in 1880 to a party on a summer evening in the 1930s. We see them each endure and remember heart-break, loss, radical change and stifling conformity, marriage and regret. Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf’s novels during her lifetime, and is a powerful indictment of ‘Victorianism’ and its values.

The next link up will be on February 1, 2026 when the theme will be a Freebie.