The writer and broadcaster chooses five of his favourites. His new book, "Your Journey, Your Way" – a guide to the mental health system, based on the author’s own experiences – is out this week.
In Praise of Older Women
This reads like an outrageously frank autobiography but is a novel about a man, like the author, who flees Soviet Hungary in 1956, eventually to Canada. Various aspects of sex and romance are encountered in a paean to the joys and complexities of relationships. The scene which explains how to seduce a stunning girl in an empty café with a battered ashtray is an all-time classic.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A.A Gill is Away
A.A. Gill, 2002
The great A.A. Gill is at his extraordinary best throughout this masterclass in the art of travel essays. Colleagues on the Sunday Times thought it tasteless to send a restaurant and TV critic to cover a Sudanese famine until Gill filed a dispatch so exquisitely honest and telling that it made them cry. He was a phrasemaker of genius.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Thunderstone
Nancy Campbell, 2022
A modern classic, this is a story of love, solitude and community set in the edgelands of Oxford. Sings with life – thought, felt and hymned.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Anima
Kapka Kassabova, 2024
My generation’s great travel writer moves to the wild highlands of Bulgaria and lives with the shepherds. Kapka Kassabova loses her relationship, her non-smoking and nearly her life and sanity to the mountains, the bears and alcoholic madmen she writes about, scoring another triumph in her Bulgarian quartet.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Wild Twin
Jeff Young, 2024
A sequel to the Costa-shortlisted "Ghost Town" – a haunted meditation on Liverpool which explores time and memory with a lyrical and shamanic intensity. "Wild Twin" (published on 18 September) follows the artist as a young man to Amsterdam, then at its counter-cultural peak. The two books are a profoundly serious attempt to see time afresh.
Available on The Week Bookshop
-
‘The money to fix this problem already exists’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Magazine solutions - November 21, 2025Puzzles and Quizzes Issue - November 21, 2025
-
The 5 best narco movies of all timethe week recommends Cartels from hell and the greasy underside of the international drug trade
-
Park Avenue: New York family drama with a ‘staggeringly good’ castThe Week Recommends Fiona Shaw and Katherine Waterston have a ‘combative chemistry’ as a mother and daughter at a crossroads
-
Jay Kelly: ‘deeply mischievous’ Hollywood satire starring George ClooneyThe Week Recommends Noah Baumbach’s smartly scripted Hollywood satire is packed with industry in-jokes
-
Motherland: a ‘brilliantly executed’ feminist history of modern RussiaThe Week Recommends Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe examines the women of her country over the past century
-
The 9 best dark comedy TV shows of all timeThe Week Recommends From workplace satire to family dysfunction, nothing is sacred for these renowned, boundary-pushing comedies
-
Music reviews: Rosalía and Mavis Staplesfeature “Lux” and “Sad and Beautiful World”
-
7 gifts that will have your Thanksgiving host blushing with gratitudeThe Week Recommends Brighten their holiday with a thoughtful present
-
6 homes for entertainingFeature Featuring a heated greenhouse in Pennsylvania and a glamorous oasis in California
-
The 8 greatest heist movies of all timethe week recommends True stories, social commentary and pure escapism highlight these great robbery movies
