@Number 71

71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.

‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.

The Blind Man's Garden, by Nadeem Aslam

Aslam's fourth novel is that rarest of things, a focused picaresque. It has been criticised by the formidable Adam Mars-Jones for a failure of courage - and yet having read the novel cover to cover and word for word, I found myself more in agreement with the praise of Pankaj Mishra. In this story of two young men who travel, naively, to Afghanistan in the October of 2001, it is the very ambivalence of the resulting consequences which render its portrayal of history at the sharp end so memorable. We are used to hearing, from one side or another, the verities of black and white. In The Blind Man's Garden, Aslam paints in technicolour shades of grey. Essential.

The Stand-In, by Caitlin Rose

The ever-present temptation to be cooler-than-thou might have demanded I list Lord Huron or Keaton Henson in this space, and yet few records I've been listening to this month have had the sheer charisma of Caitlin Rose's third LP. There's a cleverness - even a slickness - to how Rose balances the cache of retro country with the accessibility of the modern pop sound here, and, if that sounds like a demerit, then the way in which this sly production always works in support of often fabulous songwriting is certainly not. They do make 'em like they used to, after all.