Excerpt from Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

three things you need to know about Alex. The first is that a lot of women fell for him.

"The thing is, Sophie," Alex had said to me on the train we'd taken together from London Kings Cross up to Edinburgh Waver¬ley two days previously, opening a raspberry Lucozade he'd bought from the trolley, leaning towards me over the grey Formica train table as if about to reveal a universal spiritual truth. "Since I turned thirty, getting laid has become embarrassingly easy."

"Yeah?" I said. "Lucky you."

He did a little smile and drank his Lucozade. It's this image of Alex from the beginning of the festival that returns to me now: the unseriousness of his eyes, staring at the moving sea through the window of our train.

Previously lean to the point of lankiness, like an ex-racing grey¬hound, in the last few years he'd gained some muscle, having taken advantage of the paper's inexplicably well-appointed and free-to-access onsite gym that I never used. Alex now looked like the kind of human being they would put in the human being catalogues. Tall, strong, good teeth and slightly curly dark hair, physically independent, no defects. No visible defects.

Alex read what he said were "proper books." He always had a line ready on Adorno and Derrida and Stanislavski, and so what if it was always the same line? It wasn't just those guys. He had defer¬ential feminist stuff he could say about Germaine Greer and Judith Butler, and an at-the-fingertips thesis on Sarah Kane. And he could be funny about the lowbrow. He liked panto. He liked characters who wanted you to boo and hiss.

The women Alex went for were educated and arty and ambi¬tious. They were writers and directors, editors and agents. And actresses. He had, he told me, recently resolved to stop sleeping with women under the age of twenty-four after one of them told him he looked like "such a softboi, but old," and it was like being insulted in an entirely different language.

In general, he had a preference for women around his own age, who had until recently been stuck in long-term relationships with boring men who didn't appreciate them, and who had mostly wriggled themselves loose from their sexless cocoons at around thirty and, drying their wings, found themselves (a) horny and (b) looking for an intellectual equal. In Alex, they thought they might find it.

He was always briefly entangled with someone. His attitude towards women was something that made it difficult for me to think of Alex as a friend, though it's something you can tolerate in a colleague.

* * *

That's the second thing to know about Alex: he was a good col¬league. He made me laugh. He'd give me a conspiratorial eye-roll during a forward-planning meeting while he leaned back in his chair with a Biro in his mouth. He had a disarming ability to notice and remember people's preferences: he'd do a coffee run for the culture desk and remember without having to check that Gra¬ham liked his flat white with oat milk and Nicky on listings always had an extra shot.

And I had to admire his work. He could turn out copy clean as mine at twice the speed. Where my pieces could be tentative and people-pleasing, Alex's reviews were sharp and zingy and held the page.

One time, a few years ago, I'd written a feature about the Ven¬ice Biennale that wasn't working. I knew it wasn't working because Paul Ellis, my least favourite of the paper's senior editors, had told me it was shit and I needed to start again. But I'd already rewritten it four times, and I was fighting back tears at my desk, wishing that Graham, the culture editor, wasn't off sick, when Alex dragged one of the wheeled chairs over to me and plonked himself down in it.

"Don't take journalism so seriously, Soph," he said. "Can I?"

He picked up the printout of my draft, which was now covered in Paul's red Biro crossings-out, lines drawn through whole para¬graphs so violently they almost tore through the paper, and read it in about four seconds. He pointed to a sentence halfway down.

Excerpted from Bring the House Down: A Novel by Charlotte Runcie. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Charlotte Runcie.