This was deeply unsettling, especially as someone who gets quite claustrophobic - the descriptions of life in the submersible elicited a visceral reaction from me. It was slower paced than my usual reads, but I wanted answers and that propelled me to keep reading. The end had me in tears which is a rare reading experience for me.

I just love the Tales of the City books, they’re like comfort food. Michael Tolliver Lives was one of my favourites in the series. We catch up with Michael/Mouse twenty years after the events of the last book, in a post-9/11 world. This is the first book in the series to be told in a first person narrative and I enjoyed being inside Michael’s head. When we saw him last he was HIV positive in a time period where that was often a death sentence, and now he’s navigating being in his mid-50s, a survivor of the AIDS epidemic, and all that that entails.