This really reminded me of HOT MILK by Deborah Levy, reflective and completely transportive, I didn't want it to end and must go to Greece ASAP.

Despite this being under 200 pages long, it took me a while to get into this book. I found it quite a challenge to motivate myself to pick the book up and continue reading, but I persevered due to it being quite short. However, if I were to have DNF’d this book, I would not have missed a lot.

The premise seemed like something I would really enjoy, but unfortunately there was no real conclusion or character development. I thought there would be some thought-provoking ideas about self identity and development, but that was not the case.

A palimpsest of feelings
—
In any other publisher’s hands, this would be a uplifting summer beach read, of a woman newly grieving who returns to a favoured spot of a remote Greek seaside town, and there reforges connections from her previous visit. But this is a Fitzcarraldo book, and what a book! In a seemingly linear narrative, the narrator contrasts and compares her two visits to the same unnamed town, layering her memories, feelings, dreams and thoughts in a palimpsestic philosophical exploration of selfhood, belief and relationships, both inter- and intrapersonal. Professionally a lawyer, if beginning to question her motivation to become one, the narrator notes her moments in the town, making inferences and connections between the conversations she has, the things she sees, the books she reads—a book of poetry by a local mechanic, the Iliad—and observations of the people of the town, the day trippers, the tourists.

The book sets memories on top of memories, feelings alongside feelings, giving us a sense of a personality that knows some of itself to the nth degree, whilst other parts remain forever unknowable mysteries beyond logic or reason. Her late parents appear in visceral memories but also in sunlit visions and snatches of dreams, barely scribbled down in the morning before fading into a lingering mood. Buckley places us so close to the narrator that it’s almost stifling, the languid language reflecting the place in which she can be fully herself, alone and entire, without the encumbrances of ex-husband, work, daily life, to be surrounded only by what she remembers, what she thinks, what she experiences. The final chapter, in a kishotenketsu twist, puts all that has gone before into unexpected clear and stark definition, suddenly thrust into a labyrinthine worlds enfolded within worlds. What a book!

Four and a half stars.

I admit to giving up with this one, just skipping to the end to discover there wasn’t actually a conclusion worth bothering about. I found the book really tedious, and the writing far too wordy with convoluted sentences that seemed to lose track of what the author was trying to say. It’s the story of Teresa, an English lawyer, who returns to a small Greek island after the death of her father, an island that she had visited nine years earlier after the death of her mother. The narrative interweaves her present experience with recollections from that previous trip as she reconnects with the people she met back then. I had no interest in Teresa, nor in her banal musings and trite observations. There’s no plot as such, which is fine as long as it’s balanced by interesting people doing interesting things and having interesting thoughts. There’s none of that here. There’s little flow to the narrative as events are constantly interrupted by Teresa’s musings. I’m actually at a loss to say what the point of the novel is. Mere naval-gazing, I suspect. Not one for me, anyway. I was tempted to give it just 1* but there are occasional flashes of thought-provoking content, albeit not enough to keep me invested. So I’ve been generous and given it 2*.

I confess that I struggled to get into this short novel. I liked the premise of the woman returning to a place she'd felt safe and encountering the same people but with, perhaps, different results.

The first time corporate lawyer, Teresa, goes to the town is after the death of her mother; The second following the death of her father. She meets the same inhabitants whose circumstances have all changed to some extent. She remains there for some weeks whilst writing an account of her time and experiences.

There really are no conclusions in the book. It felt more like a woman struggling with various philosophies for life but never coming to a conclusion. The most interesting part for me was her meeting with a man called John who was struggling to come to terms with the suicide of his sister. But again, this does not have a conclusion.

There were times when I thought it was beginning to flow, only for Teresa to get involved in a dream sequence or a philosophical discussion and I lost my way again.

Perhaps this book wasn't for me.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.

On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John's; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.

A beautiful, hypnotic and atmospheric read with a fluid movement seeped in philosophical thought. We never have any solid ground to stand on as Buckley essentially writes about what it is to be human,

This was a beautifully written book about grief and overcoming grief in life.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley is a dreamlike, quiet, and meditative novel that lingers in the mind long after reading. I was drawn in by its atmospheric setting, its character-driven plot, and, perhaps most of all, its questioning of what constitutes a “story.” The novel seems to deliberately resist conventional narrative structures, instead unfolding in a way that mirrors the ebb and flow of memory, conversation, and literary reflection.

That said, I found myself at times distracted, my attention drifting in a way that made me wonder whether this was a fault of the novel or simply a natural response to its elusive, almost hypnotic style. Some themes—grief, belonging, betrayal—are touched upon but feel underexplored, as if Buckley deliberately holds them at arm’s length rather than fully engaging with their emotional weight. While this restraint aligns with the novel’s overall tone, I couldn’t shake the sense that certain moments, particularly towards the conclusion, lacked the depth or resolution I had hoped for.

Ultimately, I appreciated One Boat more as an experience than as a fully satisfying narrative. It’s a novel that invites reflection, one that lingers in mood and atmosphere rather than in plot or dramatic development. While I admired its quiet intelligence, I was left with a faint sense of something unfinished—perhaps intentionally so, but nonetheless leaving me slightly underwhelmed.

One Boat transported me to Greece, not only in setting but in spirit. It's an evocative novella that feels like the perfect companion for a holiday.

I especially enjoyed the novel’s structure, the self-awareness of the narrator, and the way it unfolded like a story within a story - a beautiful exercise in metafiction. The theme of returning to places and reliving memories is such a lovely concept.

My only real critiques are that it took me some time to realize and fully embrace that the narrator was female, and the frequent dream sequences, as is often the case, felt less engaging. Yet these are small quibbles in the face of a novella that otherwise captivated me.

There’s something enthralling about glimpsing fragments of lives. Well into the novella, I was convinced this would be a five-star read - I found myself highlighting passage after passage of exquisite prose.

I received a copy as an eARC, but I will be purchasing a physical copy upon publication.

What a beautiful, odd book, if at times hard to penetrate.
I very much liked Teresa's thoughts on Greece, the Greeks and her willingness to immerse herself into village life, and I also found her relationships with the Greek people fascinating - even if all of them spoke better English than most Greeks I've encountered.
I was more bemused by some of the more philosophical points of the book and the point of John's plot line but for the evocation of Greece this was a winner for me.

One Boat
By Jonathan Buckley

An interesting premise with the promise of a balmy Greek coastal village setting, however the author holds the reader at arms length, the language is practically tortured, and it's difficult to understand exactly what the story is actually about. A return to the place where Teresa previously sought haven to grieve her mother's death nine years ago, and this time it's her father's death she is mourning. There isn't much of a sense of grieving, and it's not clear exactly what she hopes to achieve by tracking down former acquaintances. The story feels directionless, the pace sags, my only points of interest being the sense of place. At times I was reminded of the mood and imagery I associate with Hot Milk and August Blue by Deborah Levy.

The final two chapters don't feel connected to the previous twelve, and close with a reminder that there needs to be a sense of direction, momentum, to keep the destination in sight at all times, always be moving forward. Ahem!

Languid, intriguing, confounding.

Publication Date: pushed out from 13th March 2025 to 9th September 2025
Thank you ##Netgalley for providing an eGalley for review purposes.

A woman travels to Greece, to a place she visited 9 years ago. Both times, she is grieving. She meets different characters along the way and has conversations on grief, life, philosophy and identity. What I really enjoyed about the book was the idea that people have different perspectives of a place when they have visited more than once; how we mould our experiences onto a place and compare those experiences to the current time; feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. A very nice holiday read. The book is written in an unusual structure (for me as the reader). This was the first of this authors’ books I have read. Some beautiful sentences, many of which I highlighted. It is nearly like there are multiple sub stories within the book, something I found slightly confusing at times but did not mind as the writing was beautiful. A lovely book to add to this publisher’s list of recommended stories.

This is the second title that I've had the privilege to read as an e-ARC thanks to NetGalley and I've decided within a few pages that I would want to buy in physical copy as soon as it is published! I highlighted so many sentences that moved me at various points in this novella. I really enjoyed the construction of the narrative, the self-awareness/auto-reflexivity of the narrator and the way that it seemed to be a novel within a novel (meta-fiction, if you will). The conceit also really worked for me, as the idea of returning to places and reliving memories from the past and yet contrasting those memories with the real present is something that I'm prone to doing! The book left me with many unanswered questions, so if you're the kind of reader who needs everything wrapped up at the end, this book isn't for you. If, on the other hand, you're like me and you enjoy the experience of being given just a window into a narrative rather than the whole world, this is a title you'll love.

One Boat tells the story of an English woman, Teresa, and her short holiday to an unnamed Greek town by the sea. A getaway from her life as a corporate copyright solicitor, she intends to use her time to reflect and ponder on the meaning of life after the death of her mother and the collapse of her relationship. During her stay she meets different locals throughout the town and builds up friendships with all of them.

Nine years later, she returns to the same Greek town, now after the death of her father, with the view to recreate this rejuvenative experience, to reflect on her complex grief, and to write, not a novel (she scoffs at being called a writer), but a journal, for the sole purpose of maintaining a poetic record of her thoughts and experiences.

This Greek town is lovely, and the description of the setting is my most positive reflection regarding this novel. Buckley depicts the heat and the languidness and the freedom of a Mediterranean holiday perfectly. The flaneur-like wandering through the town, discovering its secret nooks, cafes, peaks, museums, and people—it’s a lovely tribute to the restorative power of rest, and the book would make a perfect holiday read in warmer climates.

Another positive reflection was the novel's chronology. Due to the nine-year gap in time between visits, Buckley plays around with chronology, shifting back and forth between the town and townsfolk who were versus the town and townsfolk now. The change is what you would mostly expect, though things have become less a ‘hidden oasis’ and more of a tourist trap, and old friends who were once filled with the vivacity of youth have now grown more rugged and hardened, the town still remains, the people, moored to the soil, remain, and Teresa visits them both, summoning her latent memories, as memory is so related to place and people, so the novel posits.

The inventive quality of the novel is this ever present notebook where Teresa supplements or replaces her ‘recalled’ narration of an event with the ‘further recalled’ journalling of the event in italics. A random example I’ve picked out: “A museum had been built inside the castle since I was last there. I applied myself to every exhibit and caption — **wringing every last drop**, I wrote in the evening.” The **italicised** passage is the written recollection—and through this combination with the regular past-tense narration we experience the event from both Teresa’s immediate and reflective perspective.

When I saw this happen for the first time at the beginning of the novel I anticipated the novel showing how the actual recollection of an event can be skewed by it’s poetical representation and, perhaps, how in the act of recalling something in a poetic fashion, one can hide themselves from the actualities of life. Unfortunately, I felt nothing but unrealised potential here. Instead, Buckley seemed content with using this experimental form for the sole purpose to write pretty passages that would not normally pass from the narrator’s thoughts at the time. During several parts of the technique drops off entirely or resurfaces only to add one minor phrase per page. For me, the novelty of it wore off very quickly.

Regarding the prose, I am not the first person to draw parallels to Rachel Cusk’s ‘Outline’, not just because both novels feature English women travelling to Greece to sort out their lives, but also because the highly character-based soliloquy-driven narrative in which mini-stories are extracted from side characters, coupled with an intentional withholding of information regarding the narrator, is very Outline-like. Unlike Cusk, however, characters in One Boat are not writers, artists and poets, but regular everymen, who say as much as they can in the limited vocabulary they have.

Many times, this amounts to saying nothing, and I never felt interested in any of the characters or what they represented. Xanthe, the young waitress turned owner and mother, was a complete non-entity. Niko, the diving instructor lover, is likewise. Petros, the mechanic turned poet, is given the most space in the novel, but mostly uses it to go into long dialogues on animal and plant consciousness, and, later, a long diatribe on ecology. Not that these topics aren’t important or interesting, it just felt like the characters had nothing new to say.

That ‘nothing new to say’ extends, in my opinion, to the novel itself. ‘Platitudinous’ is a word that Teresa mentions herself, reflecting upon some of the thoughts she has summiting one of the mountains. She then comes to a later realisation that language cannot truly describe the experience of true understanding, which is something felt primally, instinctively, in the presence of the sublime. That this revelation is then ironically transmitted through words (in the form of the novel) completely dilutes the overall message. In my opinion, a writer’s goal should be to translate this sublime feeling into an innate philosophical understanding, but what Buckley offers is merely a description of this process being elicited. Many of Teresa’s epiphanies were just words. There was no sense of catharsis through the text itself.

Various other philosophical topics were broached superficially: free will, consciousness, revenge, the breakdown of marriage, art, fascism, but it feels like the novel was too short to give any of these topics justice, and other novels have succeeded here already. It felt like the rough draft or skeleton of a novel, rather than a fully fleshed out work, compositionally.

Despite going in with high expectations and good intentions, I was therefore sadly disappointed with this novel.

There is a question that these cliched passages were cliche intentionally. The ending seems to justify a more experimental read of the novel, and Teresa’s scattered notes could be the mere inklings of something grander, a more fleshed out piece of work. But what would be the point of that? It would be an excellent shield to all criticism of any work, that it is all like this on purpose.

But even if this was the case, I have no interest in unravelling the mystery, say what I would have with a Borges or a Nabokov. There’s no sense of play with the puzzle—the pieces themselves are not fun to grasp with. The experimental nature of the novel is merely like the jigsaw puzzle that reveals nothing but a white square.

I loved this book A LOT.

I read it a month ago and cannot stop thinking about it, but this book will not be for everyone.
Readers who do not like two different time frames and jumping between the two should not attempt this book.

I am still trying to gather my thoughts to write a coherent, thoughtful response, which does justice to the writing and st0ry, but wanted to pop something on here as the archive date approaches. I loved the setting (Pylos), the character journey, her interior life, and the epic, Homeric style.
When I write my blog post, I will leave a link to the review at the bottom of this page.

Spoiler alert - it will be a RAVE review. I have now put several of Buckley's backlist on order at work. I'm very keen to read more.

This was a nice and thought provoking read. I really enjoyed it and I think about it a lot even after reading it. Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for giving me an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love The Fitzcaraldo editions And I feel this title suits being in the collection. I have no strong opinions on this book I found it ok. I liked the greek setting and finding out more about the characters that live there and their past. There was some ideas on grief and life. I did wish there was a bit more going to keep my attention at times but I liked the writing style and appreciate the language used in this book. I think it is still worth it and was a fast read!

Thank you to Jonathan Buckley, Fitzcarraldo, and NetGalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

The premise intrigued me and Fitzcarraldo Editions never let me down. Unfortunately the writing style of One Boat didn’t appeal to me and I had to dnf. I think this book is definitely one for analysis, rather than enjoyment.

'One Boat' is a reflective piece that considers memory, free will, authenticity, and the performance of identity.

After the death of her mother, Teresa, goes in search of a Greek oasis, a place that will set the stage for self-discovery, grieving, and quietude. 9 years later, after the death of her father, she returns. The book seamlessly weaves between the two époques, blurring our conceptions of space, time, and chronology. Teresa's blunt self-awareness is able to root the reader in something more formed, however, which helps push the book onwards, rather than dwelling in pockets of loose philosophising.

A lover of sun, warmth, and the self-reflection Southern European countries so often bring, I found that this little novel really captured the essence of a small town ecosystem, built on the pillars of slow change, eccentric figures, and an ancient past. Political rumblings crept in at times, but were often left underdeveloped (intentionally it seems). The characters are quietly engaging, and Teresa's desire to not force meaning out of things (despite her verbal precociousness) was actually really refreshing from a narrator.

The framing at the end spoiled it slightly for me - I had been quite content with the slow build that had occurred throughout the text, and the "it was all a dream" effect of the now biography writer Teresa seemed to force a bit of a question mark over the whole text. The reader can be trusted to already treat Teresa's narrative with caution - her rewriting of events, melting pot of recollections and memories - the framing seemed to put a label on something that had already declared itself through much subtler means.