What We've Been Reading: March 2025

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for March 2025!

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 Read Think Act posts.

The third month of the year brings a historical thriller about egg-theft, meditations for black people on dignity and creativity, a punchy antidote to erasure of disabled experience and much more:

Noor

Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher - Want some fun, funny, heartfelt and escapist romantasy with a bit of serial killing thrown in? Look no further than T Kingfisher's Saints of Steel series which I listened to on Libro.fm and which is publishing UK paperback editions in April! I devoured three of these books consecutively over about a week until I ran out of credits, very fun!

The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia - A gorgeous and lyrical book that was recommended to me by my colleagues. Hannah is an Eritrean refugee living in London waiting for the Home Office to judge whether she has a place to stay or not. As this continues over years and forces Hannah into physical and mental precarity, she pushes for her own sexual agency and autonomy while telling the story of her life and that of her family's. A beautiful, dignifying, queer story about love, survival, migration and home.

JJ

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde - A series of essays from women artists and writers on how living with chronic/long-term illness immediately starts a fight for your right to create, exist and live with dignity. This collection is an affirming companion for the loneliness, gaslighting and changes that living with illness in a marginalised body can bring.

Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley - prayers and meditations for black people on dignity, recovering creativity and coming back to ourselves. Beautiful and uplifting to read.

Christina

Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You by Candice Chung - gorgeously and engagingly written, in this thoughtful, heartfelt book, Candice Chung writes about how her relationship to her parents becomes closer, mediated through food in various forms: cooking together, cooking for them, them cooking for her, sharing meals in restaurants. In part it reminded me of Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson, in that Candice Chung generously invites the readers to witness her cooking in her flat, alone and in relation to others.

I'm so excited that we'll get to host Candice Chung in conversation with Katie Goh to launch this book on 16th April - a chance for readers to get the book early as it's officially published on 24th April.

Possibility by Sareeta Domingo - I was immediately drawn in by the concept of the book - we follow Anika who has just turned 30 in a hospital bed, facing her mortality, and discovers that wishes written down in her childhood diary seem to be coming true. It's filled with memorable characters and excellent tunes! Anika's character arc has her discover that maybe she was enough all along (even without a magic diary).

Sareeta Domingo is coming to our romance festival First Date on 30th May to discuss the book and I couldn't be more thrilled!

Hannah

The Spirit Bares its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White - This got me out of a bit of a slump - couldn’t put it down and I’m keen to read more from this author. It’s pretty intense for a YA book but if you can cope with intricate anatomical detail and a lot of subjugation of vulnerable people, then get ready to root for these characters and rage at their dire situation!

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer - Frustrated with the endless trudge of capitalism based on individual accumulation? Enter the gift economy, the satisfaction of ‘enoughness’, the prioritising of reciprocity over scarcity & commodification. Wall Kimmerer uses the neat example of one species of berry (with many names) to look into how nature’s abundance, and how it is appreciated and utilised, can teach us about ecological economic systems.

It feels right to pass this book on and hope it gets passed on again, and again, to share the joy.

Mairi

Belinda Bauer's The Impossible Thing - a dual timeline historical thriller (1926/2025) about egg theft, class, conservation & corruption - loved the characters, the friendships, the high jinx. The boys in this are so lovable and such chaos, Patrick's neurodivergence is deftly drawn and the dialogue is brilliant and hilarious. Read this as an audiobook and the performance was stellar.

Saou Ichikawa's Hunchback is sexy and weird and clever and deliciously short. Shaka lives a life mostly online due to the restrictions of a severe spine curvature - she's a student and a prolific writer of smut. Hunchback is a punchy antidote to this moment we're in that keeps flattening disabled experiences.

FINALLY read Fern Brady's brilliant Strong Female Character after months of earnest prodding to do so by my girlfriend. Brady's reflections on life as a late-diagnosed autistic, a career in comedy, and how both those intersect with class and gender is so utterly compelling. She's as darkly funny on the page as she is on stage, vulnerable and honest and challenging, everyone should read it!