Companions
Welcome to Falling Further — our brand new literary companions packed to the brim with discussion points and behind-the-book extras for the titles we love most. We believe there’s something for everyone in each one; whether you’ve read the book being focused on, are reading it now, or are just deciding if it’s for you. We truly hope you enjoy reading them as much as we’re enjoying putting them together for you. They genuinely are a labour of love.
 
Buy them here as a standalone for £9.99 each, or subscribe to our Substack here for £5 a month and get every future companion as part of your subscription, delivered as we make them.
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Two families, three generations, one valley — and a single word that changes everything. Return to John Steinbeck’s great American epic and discover just how much lies beneath its surface. This companion takes you down the novel’s rabbit holes: the Hebrew word on which the whole book turns (and why timshel isn’t quite what Steinbeck thought it was), the real woman many believe lies behind Cathy Ames, the true Hamilton family hiding in plain sight, the brothels that hold up a mirror to a changing America, the Chinese Exclusion Act that shaped Lee’s world, and the questions we’d love to ask Steinbeck if only we could. Illustrated with rare archive images from the National Steinbeck Center, it’s the companion for every kind of reader. It’s for you whether you read it years ago and want the refresher your memory’s been craving, are reading it now and want the context to go deeper as you go, or are about to meet the Trasks for the first time on Netflix (spoiler warnings inside). Read it alongside the novel, and come back to it long after you’ve turned the last page.
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Step back inside Donna Tartt’s dark academia masterpiece — not just to remember it, but to see it properly for the first time. This companion sends you deep into the novel’s rabbit holes: the classical philosophy that seduces Richard and the others, the unlikely echo of real Nazi-era history buried in the novel’s DNA, the true architecture of the murder plot, and the questions we’d most love to put to Tartt herself if we ever got the chance. Whether you read it years ago and want the spaced-review refresher your memory’s been craving, are reading it for the first time and want the context to go deeper as you go, or haven’t cracked the spine yet (spoiler warning inside), this is your companion for reading with the book — and for reading about it, long after you’ve turned the last page.
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The Odyssey is three thousand years old and somehow still has secrets. We went down every rabbit hole so you don’t have to: what xeniaactually means and why it matters more than hospitality, why Odysseus calls himself ‘Nobody’ and what that pun is really doing, the truth behind Penelope’s endless weaving, the knots, the monsters, the gods who keep interfering. We look at Agamemnon as the story’s dark mirror, Telemachus’s own journey alongside his father’s and the moments of recognition that the whole poem is quietly building towards.

This is The Odyssey read closely, slowly and with genuine curiosity — the kind of reading that sends you off on your own research spiral at 1am, except we’ve already done the spiralling for you. Now, sit back, relax and fall further with us…