Read Alan Garner's Treacle Walker with us
Endnotes #23: What are you reading? • Treacle Walker • News • My recent reads
Hi everyone!
I’m Simon Haisell, the host of Footnotes & Tangents – book guides and read-alongs of great books. And this is my monthly newsletter, Endnotes. (Backlist here).
What have you been reading this month?
This is our monthly thread where we talk about the other books we’ve been reading. Let us know your recent and current reads below. The comments section gets fairly busy, so please put THE BOOK TITLE in capital letters to help fellow readers navigate the discussion. Thank you!
If you’re new here – hello! Check out our big welcome post to find out what it is all about.
Join our slow read of Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
So we’ve just finished a phenomenal slow read of William Golding’s The Inheritors. It was a revelation re-reading that book slowly in company, and I noticed and learned so much more this time around.
If you don’t know, we’ve got two big ongoing read-alongs: War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books. These are slow reads based on my book guides. You can follow the reading schedule or read at your own pace, and latecomers are always welcome!
Alongside these biggies, we’re reading some shorter books. And this Friday, we start a three-week slow read of Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker.
Treacle Walker
Published in 2021, Treacle Walker is Alan Garner’s ninth novel. It is a strange, evocative and enigmatic story about a boy with a lazy eye who meets a rag-and-bone man who can heal all, “save jealousy. Which none can.” It is a book about deep time, myth and imagination, and life’s great tussle between the head and the heart.
Now aged 91, Alan Garner has left his mark on generations of readers and writers. In Britain, we grew up with his debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1957), alongside Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, which many read at the same age we discovered Narnia and Middle-earth.
A 2016 collection of essays celebrating Alan Garner’s work includes contributions from Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith, Robert Macfarlane, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. I read it over the summer of that year, reading and re-reading, researching and writing around the book. In fact, reading Treacle Walker provided the blueprint for Footnotes & Tangents: A curious, creative, appreciative, open-hearted journey through a book. For me, this is where it all begins.
So to celebrate four years of Footnotes & Tangents, I am revisiting Treacle Walker. And I would be delighted and honoured if you would join me.
The read-along begins on Friday 3 July and runs for 3 weeks.
Every Friday, you will receive a post from me with discussion and resources for that week’s reading, and you can join the conversation in the comments section. In these posts, I offer you my footnotes and tangents. You will have your own, and I encourage everyone to treat the slow read as an opportunity to explore, reflect and create.
You can join the discussion in the comments to let us know what caught your eye or ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.
To receive these posts, turn on notifications for “2026 Treacle Walker” in your settings.
The first post is always free. To access the rest of the read-along, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to Footnotes & Tangents. This costs £5/month or £50/year. There are discounts for groups and complimentary subscriptions for readers on low or no income.
Everything related to the slow read can be found here:
How do I join?
It’s a two-step process:
Subscribe to Footnotes & Tangents, and
Turn on notifications for “2026 Treacle Walker” in the subscription settings.
You will receive a weekly post/email that links to the discussion post and podcast for that week’s reading.
In conversation
I did a couple of Substack Live chats this month. Substack Lives are video calls on Substack Notes, the social media platform linked to this newsletter.
The first was with Dr Lacey Bonar Hull, a medievalist and early modern historian. Her newsletter is called The Historian’s Desk, and we met up to talk about the rewards of slow reading Wolf Hall and our enduring fascination with the Tudors. Watch here:
I also had a wonderful conversation with Laura Crow, who illustrated Wolf Crawl and is working on her play Vile about the life of Jane Boleyn. Watch here:
Let me know if you’d be interested in doing a Substack Live. I am considering doing a series of video interviews with readers who have joined us for our slow reads, exploring your experience, where the read-alongs have taken you, and how they intersected with the rest of your life.
If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, just let me know.
My recent reads
This month, I’ve been quietly reading some big books behind the scenes. So apart from The Inheritors, the only other books I have finished are two collections of essays by Alan Garner. Both re-reads and both are highly recommended to anyone reading Treacle Walker. If you read one non-fiction book to accompany Treacle Walker, I’d suggest Powsels and Thrums.
Here’s what I read in June:
THE INHERITORS (1955) by William Golding
THE VOICE THAT THUNDERS (1997) by Alan Garner
POWSELS AND THRUMS (2024) by Alan Garner
What have you been reading?
Now it’s over to you. Let us know what you’re reading in the comments.
And if you can put THE BOOK TITLE in capital letters, it will help others find books they love or may be interested in.
Wishing you all wild and wonderful reading. Until next time,
I read THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O’Brien for the read-along, which was enormous fun. An impossible book to describe or recommend in the usual way. You just have to do it, and once you have, you understand why it works. Also THE CONFUSIONS OF YOUNG TÖRLESS by Robert Musil, alongside looking at Schiele all month. A short book that took me ages, because it is emotionally heavy and asks to be taken in small doses rather than breezed through. Disturbing, deep, and I’m glad I stayed with it. And CLARA READS PROUST by Stéphane Carlier, about a hairdresser who finds a copy of Swann’s Way left behind in her salon, starts reading it nine months later, and has her life changed by it. Plus steady progress with Proust himself, now just over two hundred pages into volume one, and a stack of books on Schiele. I must admit this was one of the hardest month to keep up with all the reading due to never ending heatwaves that we’ve been having here lately.
I read CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggers, which I enjoyed with some reservations. It is a book about art and ateliers and realistic figure drawing and I do that. I also read MY FRIENDS by Fredrik Backman, on the suggestion of a friend, and I did not like it. I found it implausible and amateurish and I don’t what to say to my friend who truly loved it. I’m currently reading BONJOUR TRISTESSE and BROTHERS KARAMAZOV with Henry Elliott and GRAPES OF WRATH with Haley Larsen. JOHN OF JOHN by Douglas Stuart is my next irl book club read and I’m looking forward to starting that one.