What we've been reading: February 2026

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for February 2026.

This is the place where we gather highlights from what the Lighthouse team have been reading each month. You can check out round-ups from previous months and years amongst our book lists.

Christina

• I just finished Djinns by Fatma Aydemir which was amazing - a multi-perspective story focusing on a Kurdish-German family in the 1990s, but spanning decades, and examining belonging, language, queerness, and how well we know those closest to us
• Middlemarch by George Eliot. As frequent readers of this blog will know, I'm in a Middlemarch book club. We read part 4 in Feb/March! I admit I am a little behind with my reading BUT I will catch up AND I am still enjoying the reading experience.

Pao

• The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Croucher - Like a trans Harry Potter but so much better. All of the boarding school nostalgia of the Enid Blyton books you grew up with, with the dark academia and ick of The Secret History. 10/10
• How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis - Very necessary to all of us neurodivergent people with a chaos house)
• Gran Partita by Matthew McDonald - SO SO good, poetry that is everything you wish poetry could be. Funny and joyful and sorrowful and big. I want to shout about this to everybody.

Also read The Bed Trick, Love Languages, Love in Exile and Date Show by Jane Bonnyman

Mairi

• A Bad Bad Place - Frances Crawford - Slice of Scottish/ Working class Glasgow history, phenomenal, great for Kirstin Innes & Jenni Fagan fans, audio book is beautifully done
• At Sea - Yasmin Abdel-Magied - literary thriller set on a deep sea oil rig, totally transporting in the setting & characters and with the level of detail its no surprise the author has a background as an engineer (and shares a few traits with her bold Sudanese/Australian main character navigating the brutal sexism and hierarchies of oil industry). The sense of impending disaster and the way you root for the MC had me reading as fast as I could, barely more than a sitting
• Jackson Alone - Jose Ando - a recommendation from the beautiful Bryan Washington for queer contemporary fiction from Japan, an angry, satirical novel about race and identity - its intense and trippy and the combination of racism, sexual violence and homophobia would have made it incredibly heavy if it wasnt so short and clever. packs a punch.

Also reading The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Ursula Le Guin essays and Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran.

Noor

• The Living Mountain - Nan Shepherd. I am late to this party but it was so worth the wait! Nan Shepherd is an education in environmental and travel writing. The book is an appreciation and almost animist musing of her time on the mountain, and a guide as to how to appreciate the splendour of the Cairngorms. It's beautifully written and will stay with me.
• Extraction - Thea Riofrancos. A really timely book which warns us to be too enamoured with the promises of green capitalism. Riofrancos takes us through the methods and dangers of extracting lithium which is the key to so many of our "green" tech solutions, and talks about what is at stake if we do.

Nic

• Human Capital by Guy Standing

Teddy

• Magnus by George Mackay Brown. A Scottish historical fiction based in the medieval Orkney islands, this novel centres the lives of peasants, women and lower classes as they are impacted by war and politics.
• Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping by Derek Jarman. Jarman’s only long form prose, this is finally in print! A surreal and wonderful adventure that takes the characters from one fantastical place to another.
• An Archive by Edmund de Waal. A collection of essays about pottery, reading and writing, all filtered through the perspective of archiving, and particularly de Waal’s experience tracing his Jewish family archive through history.
• Across the Acheron by Monique Wittig. Based on Danté’s Inferno, Wittig presents San Francisco as a hellscape that our lesbian main character must cross, fighting to liberate women along the way.
• Daddy Issues by Katherine Angel. A short essay that traces the father/daughter relationship through literature, memoir and film, this critiques the psychoanalytical approach towards fatherhood/daughterhood.
• She Will Need a Stable Boy by Jaime Lock. A beautiful poetry collection full of gender and euphoria!
• Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein. A modernist masterpiece that takes apart the murder mystery structure and puts it back together again, more thrilling (and confusing) than ever!