A succession of selves: How Do People Stay the Same by Mark Bowles reviewed

12 Sep 2026

issue 12 September 2026

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Readers of Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness (2024) will find much that is familiar in How Do People Stay the Same. Both are about a Bradford-born writer with a love of travel, philosophy and espresso. Both eschew conventional narrative for their protagonist’s meandering reflections on his past and spleen-ventings about the modern world. And both are characterised by long, clause-rich sentences that never lose their way.

The differences are of tone and form. All My Precious Madness was, to be reductive, a funny novel with sad moments, a formless rant that did suffer by its formlessness. How Do People Stay the Same is a sad novel with funny moments, a fascinating formal experiment that tells its story via a series of reverse- ordered journal entries. So, at the start, in November 2023, Patrick Boyd is the doting father of a delightful young son – a man who has achieved his happy ending; and as the novel progresses back through more than 30 years, we see that happiness unpicked by depression, eating disorders, failed relationships and housing troubles.