If only it would stop raining, I might have something to write about - but though I tell myself bracingly that I won't dissolve in the downpour, it really doesn't tempt me to venture out, even to sit damply in a cinema. Fortunately the year has kicked off with some very good reading and this gripping biography of George Orwell's invisible first wife Eileen - quite different from any other biography I've ever read - turned out to be an absolute page-turner and I devoured it in just a few days. I'd heard of Sonia Orwell (Blair?), the second wife who was the gatekeeper to Orwell's estate, but hadn't realised that she only married him literally on his deathbed. But Eileen - a shadowy figure never named in her husband's writing, and obliterated by his male biographers - was with Orwell through much of the Spanish Civil war, worked in a dangerous job at political HQ in Barcelona, saved the ms of Homage to Catalonia, probably saved Orwell's sorry life from Stalinist spies... and never gets a mention. Back home in England, she's the one who earned the money, did all the wifework in their freezing cold cottage, despite her debilitating gynae problems, unblocked the squalid, overflowing latrine, typed and edited his work, nursed him when he was sick (and he clearly didn't give a thought to coughing his tubercular guts up over anyone, not even their adopted baby) ... Now I admit I read Orwell at an impressionable age, but I'd always thought of him as one of the Socialist good guys. Turns out that he was a selfish, misogynistic, exploitative, creepy sex-pest and attempted rapist who didn't even try to hide his infidelities from Eileen, who was so self-effacing by the end that, while he gallivanted in Paris doing Important Men's Work, she died on an operating table, aged 39, possibly because the surgery was done on the cheap to save money. Her money! Anna Funder has done a brilliant forensic job piecing together scraps of evidence and giving Eileen a voice. I still feel such rage on her behalf that I'd spit on Orwell's grave. But at risk of victim-blaming, I'm raging at Eileen, too ... you just long for this highly-educated, vibrant woman tell him to f_ off.

And this is the most moving novel I've read in a long time. Although it's fictionalised, it's so rooted in the human tragedy of the Middle East that it feels like a documentary, following generations of a Palestinian family uprooted from their ancestral home in 1948 to face decades of atrocities in the Jenin refugee camp at the hands of the Israelis. I read it shortly after (belatedly) watching the heartbreaking Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land, made by a young Palestinian-Israeli group of directors, about the brutal destruction of Palestinian homes on the West Bank.