By the time he won the Literature Nobel in 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who died last year aged 89, had come to be regarded as the “Julio Iglesias of contemporary fiction”, said Nicholas Shakespeare in The Spectator.

For six decades he’d “defined headlines”: a global celebrity, owing not least to his “turbulent private life”, the winner of “numerous literary prizes” (some awarded “for mere famousness”, in the words of a critic). As Gerald Martin puts it in this biography, Llosa was a “literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior” in one.

Politically, he had shifted from communist student to “reverential supporter of Thatcher and Reagan” – and come close to Peru’s presidency. Personally, he was an iron-willed, selfish man motivated by resentment and revenge.

It all began with “a whopping lie”, said Maya Jaggi in The New Statesman. Born in 1936, the Nobel laureate spent his first 10 years living with his mother and her snobby family, believing that his father, a merchant seaman, was dead; then, aged 11, he was told that his father was not only alive, but coming to live with them.

Ernesto Vargas proved to be a tyrant who beat his “spoiled son”. Thus, as Martin puts it, “10 ostensibly idyllic years without a father” were followed by 10 brutal years with one. His subsequent experiences – at a cadet school in Lima, a spell as a reporter on a crime beat – would feed his “brilliant early novels”; later, his decision to elope, aged 19, with his uncle’s sister-in-law inspired his 1977 novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter”. Portrayed here as a cynical love rat, he dumped Julia to marry his cousin Patricia, 10 years his junior and “practically his sister”.

Martin believes that his “sadistic and often pornographic” fantasies about his “Lima Lolita” fuelled his 1966 novel “The Green House”. Fifty years on, he abruptly left Patricia for the socialite Isabel Preysler (Iglesias’ ex).

Martin – also the biographer of Gabriel García Márquez, with whom Llosa spectacularly fell out – has written a “genuinely critical life”, said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. He “restores the women whom Llosa reduced to literary raw material”, and argues the writer was never really a socialist, so much as beguiled by a socialist he met at college (Lea Barba).

The book has flaws, said Ian Thomson in Literary Review. There are too many exclamation marks and the writing “can be breathy”. Still, it is a “considerable achievement”: “gossipy, erudite and deeply researched”, it will be the “last word on the man who wanted to be the most famous writer in the Hispanic world since Cervantes”.

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In Sarah Pekkanen’s new thriller, The Women in White, a young health-care aide probes how four female participants in a 1964 parapsychology experiment suddenly vanished. Below, the best-selling author names books that influenced her as she developed the story.

‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote (1966)

In his masterwork, Capote delved deeply into the reporting of the murder of a Kansas family. The result is a nonfiction book that reads like a novel. I love building my novels on a layer of bedrock truth so I can dig into reporting, which is exactly what I did with The Women in White. Buy it here.

‘Watchers’ by Dean Koontz (1987)

A crazy hit-man, a secret lab, and a brilliant golden retriever? These unlikely ingredients turn into a power-house thriller, one of Koontz’s best. Koontz, who is famously devoted to his dogs, delivers a book of nail-biting suspense that’s packed with emotion, illustrating how an expert blends genres. Buy it here.

‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn (2012)

Flynn delivers a knockout twist midway through this thriller about a picture-perfect young woman who has presumably been killed by her handsome husband. Aside from creating one of the best unreliable narrators in the genre, Flynn taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t save the twists for the end. Sprinkle them throughout your novel, and you’ll make it stronger. Buy it here.

‘The Anniversary’ by Alex Finlay (2026)

The architecture of this book is one of its many strengths. The stories of two high schoolers, Jules and Quinn, entwine on May 1, the day a serial killer attacks one of them. Jules survives, and the book continues across a decade, with chapters telling of the first of May each year, relentlessly building toward a surprising conclusion. Buy it here.

‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier (1938)

A young woman marries a handsome, wealthy widower and becomes obsessed with his deceased first wife. Along with a gripping plot, this Gothic novel explores the danger of perception versus reality, and how our own minds can become the most dangerous terrain of all, which is a theme I love to build into my thrillers. Buy it here.

‘Bright Young Women’ by Jessica Knoll (2023)

Knoll shifts the spotlight away from a real-life serial killer and onto his victims, imagining the unfulfilled promise of their lives while creating a fictional framework, one that focuses on the lost women. It’s brilliant, it’s compulsively readable—and it’s about time. Buy it here.

‘Biological War: A Scenario’ by Annie Jacobson

Annie Jacobsen’s new best seller “moves like a meteor,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The investigative reporter who previously reignited worries worldwide about nuclear war has this time unfurled a terrifyingly plausible scenario in which weaponized pathogens quickly wipe out humanity. To paraphrase a classic bookjacket blurb, “I paused in my reading only to wipe off the sweat.” Though biological weapons are banned by international law, a handful of countries, including Russia, Syria, and North Korea, have developed and hoarded contagious pathogens. Jacobsen, after interrogating scientific and security experts around the world, has imagined an accident at a Siberian lab that launches a runaway outbreak. She gives her chapters headings such as “Day Two” or “Day Three.” Unfortunately, “Day Six is about as far as civilization gets.”

“The only recent book more disturbing than Jacobsen’s previous one is her new one,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post. In 2024, she made nuclear apocalypse feel trigger-close. The potential of annihilation by genetically engineered pathogen seems closer, in part because of scientific advances of the past 25 years. In this book’s scenario, an explosion at the Siberian lab sets loose a virus that has been designed to spread rapidly, deceive medical professionals, and produce a 100% fatality rate. A handful of people are infected, including a few who hop on planes. Soon, the horrifying virus is everywhere, and resulting scarcities of water, food, and medicine cause panic, which leads to false conspiracy theories, riots, and an utter collapse of social trust. The book is a “summons to seriousness” that should rattle any reader thinking we need to send more pyromaniacs to Washington. “Jacobsen’s message is: Cascading extinction-level events are possible, so sometimes government is a serious business.” My takeaway: “Vote accordingly.”

Though only a tiny fraction of the world’s population survives Jacobsen’s imagined Armageddon, said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker, the post-plague scene she sketches proves “strangely anticlimactic, almost consoling.” She pictures the U.S. largely emptied of people except for survivors in biohazard suits sequestered in fortress-like military facilities. Maybe, though, she has sold the catastrophe short, tying her speculations too closely to historical precedents because she knows many readers will be skeptical about her end-of-days warning. Many of us hear talk of plague and think that humanity, as ever, will manage to muddle through. At least Jacobsen’s book, because it takes account of how deadly a designer virus could be, is “a persuasive argument to the contrary.” If nothing else, “it should destabilize those of us who are quick to sneer at any talk of extinction risk as mere Book of Revelations cosplay.”

‘The Only Cure: Fraud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing’ by Mark Solms

“Who today would dare attempt a rehabilitation of Sigmund Freud?” asked Scott Stossel in The Atlantic. The father of psycho-analysis has been persona non grata in psychiatric circles for decades. But the field’s subsequent focus on brain physiology and medicinal therapies has done little to reduce the toll of mental illness. Enter Mark Solms who, as a neuroscientist, practicing psychoanalyst, and seasoned Freud translator, represents “the Platonic ideal” of a 21st-century Freud champion. Solms’ goals in his new book are “astonishingly ambitious—and contentious.” While he believes that plenty of Freudian concepts, including penis envy, belong in permanent retirement, he argues that psychoanalysis is the only approach to curing emotional disorders that works.

“Freud can be safely credited with the concept of the unconscious. We’ll give him that,” said James McConnachie in The Times (U.K.). Solms also makes a credible claim that Freud was right in speaking about a subconscious drive to seek pleasure. But while it’s refreshing to see Freud given credit as a researcher, Solms “wants to rehabilitate Freud the clinician, too,” even his belief in the efficacy of dream interpretation, and “that is a much harder case to make.” He can, at times, “come across more like a disciple than a scientist.”

“The story Solms tells seems extremely encouraging—unless, like me, you are obsessional enough to read the research papers to which he refers,” said Raymond Tallis in The Guardian. He wants us to believe that psychoanalysis has been proved more effective than other therapies, particularly drugs, but he often misrepresents the studies he cites. Still, he’s “a wonderfully witty and lucid writer,” and he has filled this book with “deeply moving” case histories, including that of a patient of his who was suffering depression, seizures, and evidence of possible dementia before four years of psychoanalysis revealed that all the symptoms were tied either to prescribed medications or to resolvable emotional troubles rooted in childhood experiences. While “the jury is still out as to whether psychoanalysis is a cure, never mind the only cure,” Solms “has nudged the attitude of this skeptic from scorn to agnosticism.”

How widespread is AI use in publishing? 

It’s almost impossible to gauge how many authors are using tools like ChatGPT. But it appears that generative AI, which can churn out a novel-length work with a few simple prompts, is driving a boom in book publishing. More than 4 million books were released in the U.S. in 2025, up a whopping 33% from the previous year. That jump was largely due to a spike in new self-published works, which rocketed 39% year on year to 3.5 million. While it is easier than ever to self-publish, research suggests many of those books were not written by humans. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that about half the books published in 2025 and sold on Amazon contained AI-generated text, up from 23% in 2023. (ChatGPT was released in late 2022.) AI writing is most common in popular genres such as romance fiction, which tends toward formulaic plots, and in nonfiction, where major news events can trigger a flood of AI books within hours. Online influencers “have been spreading the word for some time: Use AI to write a book. If it sells, it’s free money,” said tech journalist Kashmir Hill, who recently discovered an AI-generated, error-riddled biography of herself on Amazon. The “author” of Hill’s biography published nine other books the same week. But AI writing is not just confined to the self-publishing world: In recent months, at least two major publishing houses have withdrawn books over suspicions of AI use.

Which books were pulled? 

Most recently, the hotly anticipated debut novel from Nigerian-born Jerry Falade. Fourteen publishers bid for the U.S. rights to Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body; Falade, a grad student at Southern Methodist University, signed with a Macmillan imprint for more than $2 million. But the deal collapsed last month after Falade’s agents told the publisher they could no longer support the “stunningly good” crime novel because of AI concerns. Falade says he used AI only for research “and not for writing the book itself” and argues the deal’s cancellation was racially motivated. A few months earlier, Hachette nixed the U.S. release of Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl over suspicions it was largely AI-generated. After the book was published in the U.K., readers pointed to linguistic tells of AI, including word repetition (“sharp” or “sharply” appears 159 times in 247 pages); the grouping of adjectives, phrases, and ideas into threes; and the frequency of “something x, something y” sentence construction, such as, “In his hands is a cake, gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen.” Ballard claims that an acquaintance who edited the book used AI, not her. “Everyone liked” the book, one publishing exec told the Financial Times. “After Shy Girl, every editor is nervous.”

Are publishers trying to weed out AI? 

Most publishers require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which is increasingly being interpreted as a ban on AI-created text and images. That’s a sensible safeguard because AI-generated works are not protected by copyright, the foundation of the $140 billion global publishing industry. But publishing houses are loath to entirely bar authors from using AI, because there are other ways it can usefully be deployed, such as to check grammar and conduct research—although there are risks in handing that latter job to a chatbot.

What kind of risks? 

Media entrepreneur Steven Rosenbaum used AI tools to research and organize The Future of Truth, a nonfiction book about how AI reshapes reality. In May, The New York Times revealed the book contained numerous fabricated and misattributed quotations dreamed up by AI. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” To avoid such embarrassments, a growing number of publishers are turning to AI detectors: software that promises to scan a text and accurately reveal how much of it was likely AI-generated.

Does the technology work? 

That depends on whom you ask. One popular detector, GPTZero, claims to be 99% accurate. Pangram, another favored detector, claims a false positive rate of only 1 in 10,000. But critics argue that AI detectors are deeply flawed. After his sci-fi manuscript was rejected by numerous publishers, Antonio Bricio, an engineering consultant and aspiring author, ran the text through the AI detector Originality.ai. The program was 100% certain he’d used AI, but when he deleted just a few sentences, it declared the manuscript to be 100% human. “What if publishers or agents start running these AI tools on everybody?” asks Bricio. Thriller writer Andrea Bartz— a lead plaintiff in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic that secured a $1.5 billion settlement for authors over the firm’s use of pirated books to train its models—was enraged when a detector labeled her writing as 82% AI-generated. “I guess that’s what happens when your books were stolen to program AI,” said fellow novelist Rene Denfeld, whose own work was also flagged as AI.

What do readers think of AI books? 

Most want books “to come from the author’s brain and heart and not a computer that’s robbed the writer’s brain,” said author Laura Taylor Namey. And that argument is supported by the fact that book charts are still dominated by human authors. But the flood of AI works is making it harder for flesh-and-blood writers like Jess Michaels to grab attention and make a living in an increasingly crowded market. A historical romance author, Michaels has released 117 novels since 1999— most of them self-published—and has notched 10 USA Today best sellers. But she has recently seen sales drop so drastically, and the number of AI-powered imitators rise so rapidly, that she’s considering giving up publishing. “You’re talking about directly pirating my work, putting it into an engine so that you can produce a ‘Jess Michaels–type book,’ and then glutting the market with it,” she said. “I cannot tell you how soul-crushing it is.”

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Cold, al dente truth: What we generally know about Italian food in the U.S. is a mere snapshot of the country’s grand diversity. These cookbooks unveil that scope. Some include full-kitchen immersions in foodstuffs like balsamic vinegar and prosciutto, while one laser-focuses on a northern Italian region less-known in America. Together, the books expand the mind and guide the hands in the myriad delicious ways Italian cooking exists.

‘Cooking by Hand’ by Paul Bertolli

The right obsessive is destined to write a cookbook that will “wake up the imagination and capture a cuisine in both recipes and prose,” said Serious Eats. “Cooking by Hand” is that book, a personal homage and textbook from a man entrenched in a lifelong fascination with Italian cooking.

Bertolli, once a chef at a number of legendary San Francisco Bay Area restaurants before debuting his salumi company, Fra’ Mani, devotes 14 pages to his fondness for true balsamic vinegar and 12 ways to think about cooking with tomatoes. It is that kind of book, one that commemorates the “heart and soul of Italian cooking as much as its technical execution,” said Serious Eats. The recipes and instructions are built for a cook to “marvel at” because Bertolli’s “enthusiasm for the result is infectious,” said Publishers Weekly. ($40, Clarkson Potter, Amazon)

‘Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking’ by Marcella Hazan

No cuisine is a monolith. Even traditional recipes from one city can be interpreted immeasurable ways by various families. “Essentials of Italian Cooking,” however, purports to be the one true path to true Italian cooking. In truth, it is a vision of Italian food seen through the strong-willed lens of its author, Marcella Hazan, who had opinions and “was not afraid to share them,” said Aimee Levitt at Eater.

A strong point of view is a boon for kitchen literacy. You learn Hazan’s way as you cook through this “foundational text,” said Serious Eats, that aims to “enlighten, instruct and offer key cultural insights in one fell swoop.” Then, in time, you excavate your own path so that you too might be full of righteous opinions about the proper way to cook Italian food. ($45, Knopf, Amazon)

‘Pasta e Verdure: 140 Vegetable Sauces for Spaghetti, Fusilli, Rigatoni, and All Other Noodles’ by Jack Bishop

Cook with pasta and vegetables for an extended period of time, and you learn that the repertoire expands with possibility every time you shake your dinner from skillet to serving bowl. “Pasta e Verdura” is like an infinity mirror: a collection of more than 100 sauces organized alphabetically by vegetable base. Flavor and variations that go on and on.

These are “simple recipes that combine common ingredients into gourmet vegetarian meals,” said Teri Bickmore at Midland Daily News, including asparagus with mushrooms and shallots, leeks with white wine and parmesan, spinach with melting gorgonzola, and butternut squash with sage. “Pasta e Verdure” might soon be one of a “very few indispensable cookbooks” in your kitchen. ($27, ThriftBooks, Amazon)

‘The Silver Spoon’ [NO AUTHOR]

There are tomes, and then there is “The Silver Spoon.” At almost 1,500 pages, the most magnum of Italian magnum opuses was first printed in 1950. “No matter where you turn” in the beloved cookbook, you’ll be faced with the “sight of something delicious,” said Serious Eats.

“The Silver Spoon” leans toward recipes that are forthright, ones that combine a “few ingredients to make simple dishes with rustic appeal,” said Serious Eats. The allure of these recipes’ “simplicity is that many can be combined or tweaked at will.”

Still, it is too large of a book to be perfect. Sometimes the recipes are so terse, they confuse. But as a source for creative thinking in the kitchen, for expanding one’s resourcefulness in the kitchen, “The Silver Spoon” is an expansive gift. ($55, Phaidon, Amazon)

‘The Talisman of Happiness’ by Ada Boni

An almost century-long journey brought one of Italy’s most beloved cookbooks to the United States. The book’s author, Ada Boni, published “The Talisman of Happiness” in 1929, and its more than 1,500 recipes aimed to capture the breadth of Italian cooking, the cuisine of a country that was still rather new when the book was written. Boni, said the book’s publisher, Michael Szczerban, to NPR, is the “most important forgotten culinary icon in Italian cooking history.”

As of 2025, “The Talisman of Happiness” is available in English. “Regional home cooking was essential to maintaining Italy’s national culture, and the book evolved along with the cuisine,” said Kim Severson at The New York Times. Cook through “The Talisman of Happiness,” and you learn that a national cuisine is, in truth, a compendium of how home cooks across various topographies and miles feed their people with what is available nearby. ($60, Voracious, Amazon)

‘La Terra Fortunata: The Splendid Food and Wine of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Italy's Great Undiscovered Region’ by Fred Plotkin

So much of what we consider Italian food in the U.S. is, predictably, a product of migration patterns. We know well the red-sauce extravagances of southern Italian cooking. A culinary blind spot for most Americans is the cooking of the far north of Italy, which has more in common with Italy’s neighbors, Slovenia, Croatia and Austria, than it does with a tomato.

Plotkin’s essential book, “La Terra Fortunata,” captures the food and wine culture of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the northeasternmost region of Italy. It is a locale where gnocchi are stuffed with plums, and penne with cinnamon and ricotta sauce turns the “palate upside down,” said Amanda Hesser at The New York Times. You will also learn an ensnaring new way with cheese: the frico, in which shredded Montasio cheese melts then hardens into a “crisp, golden cheese snack,” said New York Daily News. ($35, ThriftBooks, Amazon)

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Film critic and historian David Thomson is the author of more than 25 books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its sixth edition. In his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, Thomson proposes that cinema has in fact been a damaging cultural force.

‘The Day of the Locust’ by Nathanael West (1939)

West’s novel fixes on two groups: the freaks and hustler failures who dream of getting into pictures, and the Los Angeles crowd that longs to follow the American dream. The result is a scary portrait of a culture going crazy and a city ready to burn. Buy it here.

‘The Last Tycoon’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1941)

Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel is not so good as a narrative, but it offers a superb glimpse of how a brilliant young head of production runs a studio. The character is based on MGM’s Irving Thalberg, who was never impressed by Fitzgerald as a screenwriter. Buy it here.

‘Picture’ by Lillian Ross (1952)

Reportage from the set of The Red Badge of Courage, John Huston’s film adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel. Ross, then a young writer at The New Yorker, records all the wild show-off talk and Huston’s battles with the studio. The world had never before heard how the moguls spoke, or thought. Those moguls were horrified when they read themselves in cold print. Buy it here.

‘The Deer Park’ by Norman Mailer (1955)

Still the best novel about love, lust, identity, money, honor, power, producers, and actors. Set against the backdrop of Hollywood and the pleasure ground of Palm Springs, Mailer’s roman à clef follows a war hero who toys with selling his life story to the movies. Buy it here.

‘My Face for the World to See’ by Alfred Hayes (1958)

A jaded screenwriter sees a young woman about to drown herself on the beach. He rescues her and then, against his smarter nature, falls for her; she is a would-be actress who drags him into her bitter melodrama. Hayes was successful with his own screenwriting, but it’s clear from this novel that he had some contempt for the craft. Buy it here.

‘The Golden Hour’ by Matthew Specktor (2025)

Matthew’s father, Fred Specktor, has been a top agent at CAA, the talent agency, since the 1950s. This book is a beautifully written memoir about growing up with the movies, making them, and trying to lead one’s life in the glow spilling from the screen. Buy it here.

‘The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory’ by Emily Eakin

“It’s tempting to read The Frenchmen as atonement,” said Dayna Tortorici in The New Yorker. Some 22 years ago, author Emily Eakin betrayed one of the passions of her youth when she was working at The New York Times and she signed off on an obit for Jacques Derrida that ran under a headline dismissing the French philosopher as “abstruse.” Just a decade earlier, Eakin had been a devotee of the post-structuralists, the cohort of mostly French, mostly male thinkers who ignited a 1980s fad that had literature students at many of America’s top universities parroting the ideas that all meaning is contingent and words can’t be trusted. Eakin, who caught the “theory” bug as a Harvard undergrad, was pursuing a Ph.D. when she finally shook it. But was the entire movement nonsense? In her engaging new book, “Eakin argues persuasively that it wasn’t.”

Not that Eakin is blind to her subjects’ many flaws, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Much of the entertainment offered by The Frenchmen comes from the tea Eakin spills on men who were once presented as disembodied monuments.” Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser were all “narcissistic, imperious, and histrionic—that is, they were very French.” In Eakin’s colorful character sketches, “only Roland Barthes comes off as remotely appealing.” Theory’s long downfall began around the time Eakin bought in, when it was revealed in 1987 that one of its stars, the Belgian-born Yale professor Paul de Man, had expressed antisemitic views while writing for a Nazi-affiliated newspaper during World War II. But while Eakin tired of theory, don’t expect her to join the critics on the Left and Right who remain eager to label post-structuralism absurd. “It taught us a new way to think,” she says. “Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths.”

As Eakin details, the battles over theory weren’t confined to academia, said Jonathan Derbyshire in the Financial Times. Philosopher Allan Bloom seemed to have the post-structuralists in mind when he railed against the influence of despairing European thinkers in The Closing of the American Mind, a 1987 best seller that remains a cornerstone of the Right’s case against American universities. Eakin isn’t afraid to admit that theory’s allure was its countercultural energy, said Geoff Shullenberger in Compact. She writes about her youthful indoctrination “with self-satirizing flair.” But when she defends theory’s luminaries, I can’t agree that their insistence that we vigorously question every story we’re told can help us recapture a sense of the common good in this moment. “Their imperative—to deconstruct—has been followed all too faithfully, for too long.”

‘Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast’ by Pamela Colloff

“Though its subtitle suggests true crime, Catch the Devil is by no means your typical true-crime book,” said Ted Conover in The New York Times. It focuses on not a killer but a snitch: a con man named Paul Skalnik who may well have set a record when, between 1978 and 1987, he provided testimony against jail mates that helped win more than 34 convictions and landed four men on death row. “The problem is that much, even most, of his testimony appears to have been invented, and some of those he helped convict were almost certainly not guilty.” And while the presence of such an unusual villain makes Catch the Devil an “engrossing” read, “the public policy implications make it important.”

Author Pamela Colloff, an investigative reporter for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, focuses on an “appalling” Florida murder case, said Kristen Martin in NPR.org. In 1986, when prosecutors failed to win a death-penalty conviction for a man who’d killed a 14-year-old female hitchhiker, they turned to Skalnik to manufacture a death-penalty case against the killer’s roommate. Skalnik obliged, reporting that jail mate Jim Dailey confessed to him that he’d stabbed the girl dozens of times. Despite a lack of other evidence against him, Dailey has since spent nearly 40 years on death row, and Colloff’s “cinematic telling of this case serves to highlight the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice.”

While reading about Dailey’s plight is agonizing, said Barbara Spindel in The Wall Street Journal, “Colloff’s rendering of Skalnik is chilling.” An unrepentant liar whose rap sheet included sexual assault of a child, he died without admitting to Colloff that he’d ever traded false testimony for lenient punishment of his own crimes. In fact, Colloff came to believe he saw her merely as his latest potential mark. A reader can’t help share her revulsion against him as well as the system that supercharged the impact of his lies. “It’s unconscionable that Dailey continues to await execution. Equally disturbing are the failings of the justice system that keep him on death row.”

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Fantasy literature has a long history of beckoning readers to escape into fleshed-out magical worlds, where wizards and dragons are the norm. Over the years, several titles have established themselves as pinnacles of fantasy fiction, molding the genre into the multifaceted entity it is today. Here are the best fantasy books of all time.

‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C. S. Lewis (1950)

The first entry published in C. S. Lewis’ seven-volume “Chronicles of Narnia” has drawn in a legion of fans across decades, said Time. The series was the “literary spark that ignited dozens of contemporary fantasies,” in which a child “suddenly discovers that magic exists.”

There have always been “fraught times,” and there have always been “those whose mastery of the art of storytelling” has helped us understand how “powerfully stories shape the world,” fantasy author N. K. Jemisin said at Time. Lewis is undoubtedly one of those greats who “sought to comfort children with faith.”’ ($11, Harper Collins, Amazon)

‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J. R .R. Tolkien (1954)

When it comes to fantasy world-building, J. R .R. Tolkien set a standard with Middle Earth. Starting as a sequel to his novel “The Hobbit,” the book evolved into one of the most recognizable and celebrated fantasy series of all time.

The world of elves, hobbits, dragons and wizards has a dedicated fanbase, many of who are Tolkien scholars. The author created a “great work of literature” that has the “power to engage an immense range of readers” and “most importantly, engage them in fundamentally different ways than its predecessors, contemporaries or imitators,” English literature scholar Michael D.C. Drout said at Lit Hub. ($26, Harper Collins, Amazon)

‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)

The fantasy genre, like other speculative fiction, is male-dominated. But there have been more than a fair share of women writing amazing fantasy books. Ursula K. Le Guin’s canon is a master class in what women can do in fantasy literature.

The author’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” challenges readers to “see the tropes and themes of a familiar genre in a way that doesn’t line up with the history of the canon,” said Lit Reactor. The world she creates with Earthsea feels “populated and alive in the way that the best fictional worlds always do,” but it also “doesn’t feel overly precious.” A “Wizard of Earthsea” is “smart, conscientious and morally responsible,” but also a “dude fights a dragon!” ($20, Harper Collins, Amazon)

‘The Golden Compass’ by Phillip Pullman (1995)

Two years before a bespectacled boy named Harry Potter took young-adult fantasy by storm, Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass” was making a name for itself as a classic of the subgenre. While both are “wildly popular,” only J. K. Rowling’s series “inspired a theme park,” The Atlantic said.

Still, Pullman’s legacy endures. After more than 30 years, his books “retain an idiosyncratic spikiness,” said The Atlantic. While Rowling’s work has a “glossy, optimized feel” and is “engineered for your comfort,” Pullman’s epic doesn’t “leach into the cultural groundwater quite so readily.” The author’s abilities as a storyteller are “stupendous,” and his stories “flood you.” ($13, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Assassin’s Apprentice’ by Robin Hobb (1995)

Another master world builder is Robin Hobb, the pen name of Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden. If you enjoy Tolkien’s Middle Earth or George R. R. Martin’s Westeros, then you’ll be an “instant fan of the Realm of the Elderlings,” said BookTrib.

The 1990s were a time of “huge change in fantasy,” as writers brought “new levels of grittiness and explicitness” to a genre that had been “prudish and puritanical, perhaps to a fault,” said The i Paper. Hobb’s work has been “every bit as boundary-breaking” as her contemporaries like Martin. This is “down-and-dirty fantasy,” where magic is “more myth than reality,” but with characters who are “richly drawn human beings, full of flaws and all the more compelling for it.” ($20, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘A Game of Thrones’ by George R. R. Martin (1996)

Thirty years ago, Martin introduced us to Westeros, a world that has spawned a series, multiple standalones and an HBO deal. The book features a mix of “political intrigue, morally complex characters and unpredictable storytelling” that before him “wasn’t the norm for the genre, which traditionally featured clearly defined heroes and villains,” said Parade.

We have Martin to thank, in part, for the resurgence of interest in high fantasy. The success of GOT “reshaped both publishing and television,” Parade said. Fantasy storytelling embraced his blueprint of “morally complex protagonists, political intrigue and serialized storytelling” that rewarded “long-term investment from readers and viewers alike.” ($21, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ by J.K. Rowling (1997)

Despite its author courting controversy in recent years by being vocally anti-transgender, Rowling’s “Harry Potter” and the larger world of wizards that she’s developed over the years were many a millennial’s gateway into the fantasy genre. Returning to the first book in the series will remind you of “what it felt like to enter this enormous, expansive, enchanting world for the first time,” a world of “wonder and whimsy where everything that really mattered happened within the walls of your school,” said Vox.

That feeling is “peculiar to the books that imprint themselves on you at a very young age,” said Vox. Harry Potter has been able to “be that kind of book for so many people all at once.” ($13, Scholastic, Amazon)

‘Mistborn: The Final Empire’ by Brandon Sanderson (2006)

Brandon Sanderson introduced his Cosmere universe with this novel, featuring edgier magic and more adult themes. With “Mistborn: The Final Empire,” Sanderson “popularized his approach to crafting complex magic systems,” in which the “rules that govern the extraordinary have more in common with a chemical equation than with a wave of a wand,” said Time.

The novel is a “standout work amid the genre as a whole,” said Grimdark Magazine. With its “impressive world-building” and thrilling revenge heist plot, the book is “not only a legitimate classic,” it is “one of the essential works in the genre.” ($24, Macmillan Publishers, Amazon)

‘The Fifth Season’ by N. K. Jemisin (2015)

When the first book in N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy arrived in 2015, it “hit shelves with a bang,” said Book Riot. The book quickly “swept the awards circuit,” winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and it was “nominated for many others, including the Nebula Award.”

In time, Jemisin dominated the Hugo Award category for three years with each subsequent entry in the trilogy. She is the first Black person to win the Hugo for a novel. There is a “grim majesty” to Jemisin’s storytelling, and an “extraordinary artistry” to how she “unwinds its interlocking narratives” and “explores the systems that constrain its characters,” said Time. ($20, Hachette Book Group, Amazon)

‘The Poppy War’ by R. F. Kuang (2018)

R.F. Kuang’s 2018 debut made it clear she was here to shake up the genre. “The Poppy War” is a “grim-dark military fantasy novel” that draws on “mid-20th century Chinese politics” from the Imperial Dynasty, said Comic Book Resources.

It is highly regarded for its “complex portrayal of a strong female protagonist” and the “heavy psychological toll of war,” said Comic Book Resources. Kuang’s “rich and intricate world-building” blends historical events with a “unique shamanic magic system.” ($10, Harper Collins, Amazon)

While promoting his latest blockbuster, filmmaker Christopher Nolan listed scholar Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” as one of his influences. Now, Wilson’s scathing critique of Nolan’s cinematic take on the epic poem has gone viral, inspiring additional backlash from critics and academics alike. Amid the heated controversy over one of the year’s biggest films, there may be a silver lining to the discourse.

Why Wilson trashed Nolan’s adaptation

Wilson’s expertise in the classics is undeniable. She is also no stranger to backlash. In 2017, she became the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” from ancient Greek into English, an interpretation “widely celebrated in academia and the literary world” as “comprehensive, modern in sensibilities and faithful” to Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old classic, said The New York Times. Her translation departs from the “masculine framing used by her male predecessors,” a move that has “subjected her to online harassment and misogyny from men and far-right figures.”

Before Nolan’s movie premiered, Wilson was “pumped” to see how the epic played out on the big screen, she said on The New York Times’ The Daily podcast. However, after seeing Nolan’s adaptation, Wilson said she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script” at The London Review of Books. The film had “nothing convincing to say,” it lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth,” and the “writing is abysmal,” Wilson added. It was a “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle” comparable to an “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.”

Most of the nonwhite actors “play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” Wilson said in her LRB review. She has since expressed regret for this “paragraph about the uses of the POC actors — who are all great, but IMO under-utilized,” Wilson wrote on social media. She still thinks the film “largely wastes its strong cast,” but she “framed it badly.”

A debate reminiscent of the golden era of critics

One of the most prominent figures to come to Nolan’s defense against Wilson was Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities and a prolific writer who has won a National Book Award. Wilson’s “tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said on X. Instead of “disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” Wilson, who has “benefited enormously from Nolan’s film,” speaks in the “crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.” Within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.” One would expect a translator to be “just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Wilson used “baffling arguments” to “flay” Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, classicist Theo Nash said at Slate. She criticizes Nolan for deviating from the text, “as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation.” The close attention that informs her translation is “lacking in her reading of the movie,” and the “idea that Nolan might have something new to say about ‘The Odyssey’ is denied.”

Whether or not you agree with Wilson’s perspective, it’s “always exciting to read a particularly full-throated pan,” said critic Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. Even if you don’t believe Wilson did her job as a critic, she has “done her job as a writer,” which is to “be a compelling read who makes her argument unmistakably clear.”

Figuring out “who is punching down here is really interesting,” VanArendonk added. Since Wilson has “academic authority” and is “writing with such vigor,” it is “easy to forget that she has less power” than Nolan, a Hollywood darling. That is also “part of the pleasure of the conversation.” Wilson is not interested in “softening any of it.” Still Nolan’s the one who “walks away unscathed, no question.” Of all the topics we could watch people fight about online, “how someone adapted ‘The Odyssey’ is such a good one.”

An AI company has “destroyed” millions of books as part of a “controversial project” to train its models, said City A.M.

Tech giants want to “feed an insatiable demand for training data” but their methods could have serious ramifications for the publishing industry and the quality of future books.

Suspicious orders

The alarm was first raised when antiquarian booksellers in the UK and across Europe started to receive curious requests for thousands of obscure titles from anonymous buyers.

A London-based seller of rare books received two “unusually large” enquiries for specialist books from anonymous email addresses, with “no names or company details attached”, said City A.M. The buyers asked for additional photographs of the books before placing sizeable orders.

When the bookseller asked the purchasers “who they were and where the books were going, neither replied”. The retailer suspects the orders were placed by AI companies.

According to recent court documents, Anthropic, the developer behind Claude, launched an internal programme known as “Project Panama”, which concluded that books were “essential” for training advanced AI models.

One senior executive at the AI giant said that books taught systems “how to write well”, as opposed to using “low-quality internet speak”. The company bought millions of second-hand books, “sliced off their spines” using “industrial cutting machines”, scanned every page and recycled the rest.

Internal planning documents at Anthropic also showed bosses wanted to keep the programme secret, said Futurism. One executive said: “We don’t want it to be known that we are pursuing this project,” according to those recent court documents.

Orders have also come from Canadian company Zoom Books, according to AA, but the company has denied participating in the digitisation and destruction of books for AI development.

‘Legal loopholes’

This trend has “raised fresh concerns about copyright and the future of physical books”, said AA. But dealing with the issue could be quite another matter; copyright violations are “difficult to prove in court” because of “legal loopholes”.

Thomas Koch, of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, said it “appears to be yet another example of AI companies using vast quantities of copyright-protected works to train their language models, without consent and without payment”.

The absence of disclosure obligations makes it “nearly impossible” for authors and publishers to determine whether their works have been incorporated into AI training datasets. Also, the legal standing “differs significantly across jurisdictions”.

AI systems have been “trained on copyrighted books” and can now produce new books “almost instantly”, leading to an “influx” of “low-cost, AI-generated titles” on digital marketplaces. Publishers are calling for stronger regulation from national governments and the EU.

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Writer, theater director, and podcast host Isaac Butler is the author of The Method, an acclaimed history of method acting. His new book, The Perfect Moment, explores how the culture wars of today took root when a culture war broke out in the late 1980s.

‘It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful’ by Jack Lowery (2022)

Lowery’s biography of Gran Fury, the most prominent of the art collectives within the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, is equal parts thrilling, inspiring, and enraging. Drawing on interviews and archives, Lowery shows how artists and activists banded together to fight two plagues—one a disease, the other of hatred and indifference—that were devastating our nation. Buy it here.

‘Fire in the Belly’ by Cynthia Carr (2012)

Carr knew the artist David Wojnarowicz and, as a journalist for The Village Voice, extensively covered the 1980s East Village milieu in which he lived. Her portrait of Wojnarowicz and his era brilliantly captures what it means to lead a fiercely principled life in a corrupt world. Buy it here.

‘The History of White People’ by Nell Irvin Painter (2010)

Painter weaves thousands of years of history together, telling the complex story of why we invented whiteness and how its meaning has both shaped and been shaped by world events. One great surprise of the book is how much art history can be found within it. Buy it here.

‘The Wars of the Roses’ by Dan Jones (2015)

I did a mini crash course in military histories while writing The Perfect Moment, and by far the best contemporary example I read was Dan Jones’ chronicle. Beginning with the usurpation of Richard II and ending with the ascension of the Tudors, Jones manages a massive story with superhuman clarity and storytelling bravado. Buy it here.

‘The Devil Finds Work’ by James Baldwin (1976)

Today we take for granted that long-form criticism will often include both autobiography and political critique, but Baldwin was a pioneer of the mode and remains one of the best to ever do it. The Devil Finds Work is a slim volume that will have you rethinking the relationship between film, politics, and identity over and over again. Buy it here.

‘Fear of Flying’ by Erica Jong (1973)

When I started reading Fear of Flying, I knew that it was a landmark feminist novel and that it was the subject of a congressional inquiry. What I didn’t know is that it is outrageously funny, endlessly compelling, and equally artful and honest. Buy it here.

‘Cool Machine: A Novel’ by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, which his “dizzyingly brilliant” new novel completes, is “destined to live on as an American classic,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Since 2021’s Harlem Shuffle, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has been following Harlem resident Ray Carney, watching the Black furniture store owner and sometimes fence for stolen goods as he navigates a changing New York City from 1959 to 1986. While the novels “have a great deal to say about serious subjects such as systemic racism and corruption, they often lean on humor to get the message across.” Ray, having now reached 50, has achieved respectability, but he’d rather step back into crooked side hustles than fade into semiretirement, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. “This man wants to feel alive again, and you will too, riding along through escapades so cinematic the book should come with a bucket of popcorn.”

Cool Machine turns out to be the strongest novel of the trilogy, said Walton Muyumba in The Boston Globe. And though it’s “doused in Whiteheadian cynicism, sardonicism, and ambivalence,” it “counters those sensibilities with a foundational Black American concern: justice.” The novel consists of three novellas, set, respectively, in 1981, 1983, and 1986, with each tale driven by a bid by Ray or an associate to level the world’s playing field. In the first, Ray joins a criminal ring after white bankers deny his wife a business loan. In the “taut, gorgeously designed” second, a menacing but avuncular associate named Pepper tries to recover an African mask in the East Village. And in the final section, Ray seeks to rescue a younger family member from a murderous scheme involving cable TV, union contracts, the mob, and U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Though you don’t need to read the trilogy’s books in order, “I’d recommend it,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. “The best reason to come to Cool Machine, and to the others in this series, is to drink in Whitehead’s intellectual breadth, his ambivalent irony, his moral seriousness, and pinball verbal play.” These aren’t “‘great’ novels as we have traditionally understood that term,” but “they are entertainments of a high order” and they offer pleasures that The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s more somber 2016 and 2019 prizewinners, do not. You can read Cool Machine for its heists and beatdowns, because Whitehead “nails the pacing and the details.” But you’ll also get a memorable portrait of a marriage and a sideways look at how the interests of cops and criminals intertwine. “Most saliently, this is a heavyweight New York novel.” In a manner that’s all his own, “Whitehead cracks the city open like a crab and pulls out the meat.”

‘The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal’ by Catherine Ostler

“Reading The Renoir Girls feels like watching the unfolding of a horror film, albeit a very pretty one,” said Luke Lyman in The Washington Post. The pretty 1881 painting at the book’s center, Pierre-August Renoir’s Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, or Pink and Blue, depicts two sisters, roughly ages 5 and 6, who had no idea of the grim future that awaited them. The girls’ father, Louis, was a powerful Parisian banker and their mother, Louise, a salonnière who commissioned Renoir to paint the portrait. The Cahen d’Anvers family was also Jewish, and their peak years were followed by a downfall that wealth could not prevent. By tracking the life stories of the sisters, author Catherine Ostler “transforms history’s grand sweep into intimate profile.”

In describing the sisters’ upbringing, Ostler “paints a glittering picture of cake shops and cotillions, trips to the dressmaker and dancing till dawn,” said Kathryn Hughes in The Times (U.K.). To fully capture belle epoque Paris, Ostler draws material from the novels of Marcel Proust, who based Charles Swann, a prominent figure in his magnum opus, on a man who had a long affair with Louise and may have been the father of Alice. But this isn’t a book filled with high-society gossip. “Its real subject is antisemitism, which starts as a background whisper and becomes a terrifying roar,” particularly after French army captain Albert Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was unjustly convicted of treason. The case sharply divided France, and Renoir sided with the haters.

It’s in following the diverging paths of Alice, Elisabeth, and their older sister, Irène, that Renoir Girls “gathers its emotional force,” said Guy Walters in The Independent (U.K.). Irène largely retained her luxurious life during World War II, though both her daughter and grandchildren were murdered at Auschwitz. Alice, meanwhile, effected a desperate escape from Europe in 1940. Elisabeth, at 69, was swept up by the Nazis four years later, dying at or en route to Auschwitz. “By the time the narrative reaches its conclusion, the painting with which it began has acquired a different weight.” The stillness of its figures “becomes poignant, even unsettling,” because that stillness “marks not the permanence of a world, but its transience.”

Rachel Cusk is no stranger to controversy. Her candid memoirs on the perils of motherhood and her messy divorce drew a particularly hostile reaction, and her latest book – “Life of M” – has sent the rumour mill into overdrive that a character is based on Natalie Portman. But the British novelist has also transformed autofiction and scooped multiple literary awards for her icy dissections of human behaviour. Here we take a look at some of her best books.

A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001)

Cusk’s “brutally honest and somewhat confronting” memoir about motherhood sparked an almighty backlash and accusations of child-hating, said Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. But it’s also “bitterly funny about the culture and institutions of motherhood”, and over two decades later remains “one of the best, and least sentimental”, accounts of pregnancy, childbirth and caring for a newborn.

Outline (2014)

The first book in Cusk’s “groundbreaking” trilogy of the same name is a “fitting entry point” to her work, said The Guardian. It follows “divorced novelist and mother-of-two” Faye on her journey to Athens to teach a writing course, and unfolds through a series of conversations with people she “meets along the way”. Conventional plot is “practically non-existent” here which turns out to be “revelatory”. “Really, it’s a masterpiece.”

Coventry (2019)

In her first book of essays, Cusk proves her non-fiction can be as “coolly glittering” as her novels, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Tackling themes she’s known for – “her obligations as mother, daughter, citizen, artist and breadwinner” – she writes with “candour”, “seriousness”, and a “subtle” touch. These are “first-rate” essays, well worth reading.

Second Place (2021)

This “feverish” novel follows a woman named ‘M’ who invites a “visionary painter” to spend the summer at her remote coastal home, said Emily Watkins in The i Paper. Written as a series in “confessional letter form” to someone called Jeffers, it’s a “delicious” read that’s best devoured in one sitting.

Parade (2024)

Cusk writes about several different artists – each referred to only as ‘G’ – in this “masterful exploration of art and identity”, said Buzz Magazine. This isn’t a new topic for the writer but her language is “always fresh and ambitious”, and her prose is “ablaze with wit”, making it worth “the time it might take to settle in” to this experimental novel.

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Summer is simmering to its end soon, but we still have all of August — and much of September — to tackle that summer reading. No matter what kind of book you’re looking for, this month has a lot to offer, including a sequel that will form the basis of an upcoming season of an HBO series and a Korean coming-of-age story about an immigrant in 1970s New York City.

‘Etna’ by Paul Yoon

Yoon’s story of a former military dog “attempting a treacherous journey home” during the aftermath of a war “rarely moves in expected ways,” said Library Journal. The novel’s narrative structure is an “amalgam of ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘Au Hasard Balthazar,’” portraying Etna as a “heroic figure who bears witness to humanity’s best and worst.” The author’s “fabulist shading” positions the story at a “nexus of grim reality and hopeful fairy tale, enlivening and devastating readers in equal measure” as they watch the dog “reckon with the all-too-human conclusion that one can’t go home again.” (Aug. 4, $28, Simon and Schuster, Amazon)

‘Take What You Can’ by Naima Coster

This touching story about the lifelong friendship between Val and Milly follows the pair from when they met in 2004 as the only Black students in a French study-abroad program, to a decade later when they are both mothers. In this “delicious page-turner,” set in such “alluring locales” as Paris, Provence and Park Slope, Coster brings us “two fascinating, fallible, and sometimes frustrating characters” who are learning to “balance freedom and responsibility — to themselves and their families, both biological and chosen,” said Kirkus Reviews. Writing with “sensitivity, candor and insight,” Coster “compellingly tracks the ups and downs of longstanding friendship, motherhood and daughterhood, marriage and career.” (Aug. 4, $30, Pamela Dorman Books, Amazon)

‘A Tender Age’ by Chang-Rae Lee

In Chang-Rae Lee’s seventh novel, a man “looks back on the small wounds and larger traumas of his youth,” said Kirkus Reviews. Jeon-Gi, the narrator, recalls life as a 10-year-old boy in 1976, a “pivotal time for this son of Korean immigrants.”

In the New York City apartment complex that his family relocates to, the “children’s identities” are based on “racial and ethnic groups, as well as their capacity and willingness to dominate others.” “A Tender Age” is a “melancholy, emotionally rich story of preadolescent struggles.” (Aug. 11, $30, Riverhead Books, Amazon)

‘The Secrets We Hide’ by Karin Slaughter

Slaughter’s “satisfying sequel” to “We Are All Guilty Here” sees Georgia sheriff Emmy Clifton investigate a “complex murder case with the help of her estranged sister,” said Publishers Weekly. Slaughter remains as “skilled as ever at probing the darker side of life in Georgia.” This “bodes well for the future of the series.”

“The Secrets We Hide” demonstrates Slaughter’s “effortless primacy,” said the Financial Times. The latest entry in her North Falls series “deals provocatively with the fallout from a blood-spattered murder involving child abuse and exploitation.” (Aug. 11, $32, Harper Collins Publishers, Amazon)

‘Big Little Truths’ by Liane Moriarty

In this sequel to the bestseller “Big Little Lies,” a decade has passed and the main characters, Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata and Bonnie, are “navigating mothering teenagers,” said Booklist Queen. In the first book, the group of women “bonded as they became embroiled in a homicide investigation,” said Variety.

“Big Little Truths” will be the basis for season three of the HBO series based on the books. Moriarty isn’t “particularly hands-on with the show.” Still, while the series team “didn’t have any input on the plot of the new book,” they did “inspire some of her writing.” (Aug. 25, $34, Crown, Amazon)

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In Kimberly McCreight’s best-selling new thriller, Someone Else’s Husband, a New York City artist is murdered after having an affair with a married man during a group climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Below, McCreight recommends six other books built to offer instant escape.

‘Heartwood’ by Amity Gaige (2025)

The story of an experienced hiker on a perilous stretch of the Appalachian Trail who gets lost in the Maine woods. Told from the points of view of the hiker, a game warden in search of her, and a mysterious retiree who is somehow connected, Heartwood is a riveting and moving account of the high-stakes search for a missing woman and so much more. Buy it here.

‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed (2012)

Strayed, after facing immense loss in her personal life, packs up her things and takes to the mountains. With no preparation and the daunting task ahead of her of hiking from the Mojave Desert to Washington state completely alone, she shows us what strength and independence can really mean. Buy it here.

‘Five’ by Ilona Bannister (2026)

In this whirlwind of a story, you know from the start that one of five people waiting on a train platform outside London will die in the next five minutes, though you don’t know which one. You’ll be swept away by the suspense, but more importantly by the intricate stories that deliver all the characters to that fated moment. Buy it here.

‘Into the Wild’ by Jon Krakauer (1996)

Many wish they could pack up their bags, throw away their dreams, and start a new life, but not many do it. Christopher Johnson McCandless did. This true story follows his ultimately tragic path hiking in the uncharted wilderness of Alaska. It’s moving, gorgeous, and riveting. Buy it here.

‘A Good Person’ by Kirsten King (2026)

Lillian, following the unsatisfying dissolution of her situationship, embarks on a journey testing her morals and soul. To recontrol the uncontrollable, Lillian casts a hex on her ex-lover Henry, but this all-too-relatable impulse could have serious consequences. King’s voice in the book sucks you in and simply won’t let you think about anything else until the final page. Buy it here.

‘Atmosphere’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2025)

Ready to leave Earth itself behind? Set in the 1980s during the NASA space shuttle program, this suspenseful novel reveals the complexity behind every expedition, following the relationships and obstacles while conveying a love of exploring the unknown. Buy it here.

‘On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction’ by Lixing Sun

Birds lay eggs, bees pollinate flowers, and for as long as anyone remembers, humans have been using such examples to introduce their children to the subject of sex, said Elle Hunt in New Scientist. But as any expert in the field would know, “the birds and the bees analogy just doesn’t capture the diversity, drama, and strangeness of animal reproduction.” In Lixing Sun’s “engaging” new book, the Central Washington University biologist shows an “infectious” enthusiasm for detailing the many ways that life on Earth multiplies itself, starting with asexual reproduction as practiced even by some sharks and condors and extending to mallard ducks’ corkscrew vaginas and penises. “But as the title suggests, Sun’s scope is far more ambitious,” taking on such big questions as why sex exists at all. And even when Sun writes as if all his readers know evolutionary biology as well as he does, “the book remains interesting because the many examples of kooky animal sex make it a pacy read.”

Credit recent findings that have upended biologists’ understanding of sex and its history, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. The new body of research “has given rise to a new sort of natural-history book, one so racy that it would have made Charles Darwin raise a bushy eyebrow.” Sun’s contribution to the field opens by reminding us that, because asexual reproduction is more efficient, it’s still not settled what evolutionary purpose sex serves. The theory known as Muller’s ratchet holds that sex counters the buildup of dangerous genetic mutations. The Red Queen hypothesis posits instead that sex helps species stay one step ahead of parasites, and the “wonderfully named” Vicar of Bray hypothesis posits that it helps species adapt quickly to environmental change. “All of these theories have a certain appeal, yet all have been found wanting.”

“Whatever the reason, it is sex that has created the complexity of our world,” said Adam Weymouth in The Times (U.K.). As Sun plays usher, he sometimes anthropomorphizes the sex lives of other creatures, going so far as to speak of single-cell organisms engaging in “flings.” Such playfulness “can end up somewhat trivializing the material,” and where his book “really becomes sticky” is in its attempt to invoke biological imperatives to explain certain human behaviors, including sexual violence. But he does score points when he highlights the fluidity of gender identities and gender roles in the animal kingdom and recommends that we accept, as any pregnant male seahorse might, that there aren’t fixed rules in nature about what it means to be male or female. “The world is complex beyond our comprehension,” and “when it sticks to the science,” The Origin of Sex is “an enlightening study.”

‘You Won’t Get Free of It’ by Rachel Aviv

“Is it only literature that allows us to fully enter strangers’ lives, inhabit conflicting perspectives, and understand the ways we see and fail to see one another?” asked Melanie Thernstrom in The New York Times. The “stunning” title essay in Rachel Aviv’s new book about tangled mother-daughter relationships shows that nonfiction, when done right, can match fiction on those grounds. The piece investigates why the Nobel-winning author Alice Munro chose to stay with her second husband even after she learned that her youngest daughter had been sexually abused by him for years. Aviv, in expanding here upon a 2024 article she published in The New Yorker, “masterfully resists editorializing,” allowing readers to make their own judgments. The piece stands as “the crown jewel” of a “piercing” collection that showcases Aviv’s narrative skills.

Beyond the focus on the mother-daughter dynamic, said Thomas Beller in 4Columns, the book’s seven essays “share a preoccupation with states of dissociation,” as the protagonists are all in states of denial or delusion. The first essay, “I Wish I Were Her for You,” introduces Hannah Upp, a school-teacher who, when she was plucked out of the waters of New York Harbor, couldn’t remember where she’d been for the past three weeks. “Removable Truths” looks at Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who during childhood refused to acknowledge that her mother was psychologically unraveling and has since become a specialist in the unreliability of memory, even serving as a defense witness for Harvey Weinstein. Throughout the book, Aviv “moves effortlessly between reporting on events and entering the inner lives of her subjects.”

Aviv says she’s drawn to unstable perspectives, and her storytelling “leans on the idea of unreliable narration,” said Julia M. Klein in the Los Angeles Times. But her time and point-of-view shifts “have a downside,” producing essays that “can feel self-indulgent and overlong.” The approach works in the piece on Upp, as Aviv eventually shifts her attention to Upp’s mother, who, while searching for her missing daughter, connects with other lost women. Otherwise, to me, these stories “aren’t fully satisfying,” though perhaps they’re not meant to be. “As the collection makes clear, Aviv prefers restless questioning to closure.”

The psychotherapist and author of "Grief Works" picks books that changed how she understands dying and grief. She will be speaking at the inaugural Big Brue festival of ideas in Bruton, Somerset, 19-20 September.

Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy

J. William Worden, 1982

This is a book for therapists, but valuable to anyone. Worden’s four tasks of mourning helped us move away from the rigid idea that grief follows fixed stages. We cannot control the loss, but we can engage with the work of adapting to it. That idea offers agency when life feels helpless.

With the End in Mind

Kathryn Mannix, 2017

Drawing on decades in palliative medicine, Mannix tells stories of ordinary people as they approach death. She writes with such compassion and clarity that the frightening becomes more knowable. It’s a book that helps us prepare for the deaths of those we love and have the conversations we often avoid.

The Grieving Brain

Mary-Frances O’Connor, 2022

A neuroscientist, O’Connor explains that grief is a form of learning. After someone dies, the brain must slowly update its understanding of the world. She helps explain the yearning, confusion and repetition of grief, while offering the deeply reassuring knowledge that adaptation takes time.

Continuing Bonds

Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman and Steven L. Nickman, 1996

This collection challenges the old belief that we should detach from the person who died – forget and move on. Instead, it shows that the relationship carries on, in a changed form. Death ends a life, but the love never dies.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion, 2005

Didion’s account of her husband’s sudden death captures the strange logic of grief with great precision. She shows how the mind knows someone has died while another part still expects them to return. It is fiercely personal, yet almost every bereaved reader will recognise something of themselves within it.

For more than 50 years, David Thomson has been “watching and writing about movies and hanging out with movie people”, said Ed Potton in The Times. The author of more than 40 books, including the highly influential “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (1975), he is “unique in his field”, being “intellectual, opinionated, informed and funny”. Now, at the age of 85, Thomson has written a book “billed as the capstone of his career”. A history of the movies, “from the Lumière brothers to the Coen brothers”, from “Psycho” to “Pretty Woman” to Jean-Luc Godard, it also covers much else besides: “we get detours to John Keats, Gustav Mahler, Werner Heisenberg and Tracey Emin, none of which feels dilettantish”. Thomson also celebrates the “written word”, and suggests that novels are in many ways superior to films. Written in a style that “veers between conspiratorial and donnish”, this book has the “learning of an encyclopaedia, the wisdom of a novel and the zingers of a screwball comedy”.

While he remains as obsessed by film as ever, Thomson is increasingly fearful that “movies may be bad for us”, said Mark Glancy in Literary Review. There is, of course, nothing new about claims that they shorten attention spans and flatten our sense of evil. But Thomson suggests such anxieties have been “given new weight and immediacy by the rise of Donald Trump, with his constant demand for our attention and his indifference to morality”. It’s an argument which seems, alas, a bit of a “rabbit hole”. Fortunately, such “wintry and sombre ponderings” don’t take up too much space, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. For the most part, this book is a “straightforwardly rapturous, rhapsodic celebration of the extraordinary adventure of cinema”, written by an author who, despite his advanced age, is as “eccentric, exasperating and absorbing as ever”.

The school holidays are here, marking the start of the Summer Reading Challenge for four- to 11-year-olds. Kids up and down the country are being encouraged to sign up online or visit their local library to get involved. For every book they read, they’ll be rewarded with stickers and character cards, and if they tick off six titles they can expect a certificate and medal.

Whether your little one has signed up for the challenge, or you’re looking for the perfect present for your niece or nephew, here are some fun, absorbing books to help spark a love of reading.

Dogs and bears by Max Porter, ages 3-6

“KRUMP! POFF! The dogs and the bears are brawling again,” said Imogen Russell Williams in The Guardian. “What will it take to cool off their combat?” Dorotheé de Monfreid’s “vigorous” illustrations combine perfectly with Porter’s “wittily portentous text” in this “highly original” book about squabbling animals.

Who Says Moo? by Axel Scheffler, ages 3-6

The latest board book from Scheffler, illustrator of “The Gruffalo”, will instantly draw in younger children, said Emily Bearn in The Telegraph. Follow Little Calf as she meets different animals on the farm: will she ever learn to say “moo”? Scheffler’s sheep, ducks, pigs and cockerels are “expressive and instantly legible, inviting even the youngest children to point, name and imitate”.

Monsieur Mustard by Charley Rabbit, ages 5-9

When Fabio Fangtooth goes missing from his restaurant, it’s up to the “charming mouse detective”, Monsieur Mustard, to figure out what happened, said Anna Bonet in The i Paper. But he soon gets “tangled in an even bigger mystery”. Bringing together “graphic novel elements with classic detective storytelling”, this beautifully illustrated book is a “witty and inventive” read.

Detective Thingy Majiggy by Cecelia Ahern, ages 7+

The bestselling author of “PS, I Love You” has written her first book for children. It's about “a 10-year-old girl who can hold conversations with inanimate objects”, said Bearn in The Telegraph. When Mia is accused of starting a fire at her school, can a “broken toaster” help to “prove her innocence”? The “chatty, accessible” narration will help Ahern’s book find “wide appeal”.

The Common Criminals’ Club: Death Before Detention by Alison Weatherby, ages 9+

This cosy murder mystery is set in a rural Irish Catholic boarding school. When a dead body is discovered in the kitchen, “Mae and her friends are determined to solve the mystery”, said Russell Williams in The Guardian. “Funny” and “twisty”, with an “irresistible heroine and a fantastically distinctive voice”, Weatherby’s book is perfect for fans of bestselling children's author Robin Stevens.

The Not-So Great Escape by Emma Green, ages 9+

When tragedy strikes, “risk-averse” 12-year-old Hedley finds himself on a road trip adventure with his younger sister Lilly, “troublemaker” Aiden and a “stolen alpaca”, said James Lovegrove in the Financial Times. “Silly” and fun with a “heart-rending twist” at the end, it’s a gripping read.

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A good coffee table book can spark infinite conversations, and this is especially true when the focus is on travel. Guests connect over destinations they’ve visited or dream of seeing, sharing memories and tips, and the spectacular photography might also encourage them to pick up a camera and better document their future trips. Stack these books in your living room, and see how they inspire.

‘African Adventures: The Greatest Safari on Earth’ by Aline Coquelle

Let photographer Aline Coquelle show you Africa through her eyes. The book is split into four experiences: seeing Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, the Okavango Delta in Botswana, the Great Migration in Kenya and the silverback mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

“African Adventures” features “epic” wildlife photos of baby elephants learning to walk and protective lionesses with their cubs along with snaps of the “most beautiful” boutique lodges, said Condé Nast Traveler. Coquelle’s “stunning” photography also offers a “deeper exploration” of each area’s “talented contemporary artists, artisans and conservationists.” ($120, Assouline)

‘Destinations of a Lifetime: 225 of the World’s Most Amazing Places’ by National Geographic

“Destinations of a Lifetime” combines the breathtaking photography National Geographic is known for with helpful insider information on how to visit like a local and the histories of each spot. Chapters include “Sea and Shore,” “Mountain Majesty” and “Town & Country,” showcasing different locales and pulling together itineraries that allow you to see as many of these connected places as possible. If you’re stuck on the next country or city you want to visit, flip through “Destinations of a Lifetime,” pick any page and you’ll be booking a plane ticket in no time. ($21, Amazon)

‘Dream Trips of the World’ by Lonely Planet

This comprehensive guide explores 100 spectacular travel opportunities, including witnessing the Northern Lights in Norway, cruising down the Nile River and visiting Bhutan’s monasteries. Each trip featured is accompanied by a detailed itinerary on where to go and what to see, tips on places to eat and how to pack, beautiful photography, and comments from local residents and travel experts on ways to best approach the destination. ($45, Lonely Planet)

‘Gray Malin: Dogs’ by Gray Malin

Welcome to the whimsical world of fine-art photographer Gray Malin and his model pups. Malin took his canine muses on his travels, capturing the dogs as they relaxed poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, took a ski lift in Aspen and explored the streets of London. Use this as inspiration for places to go with your own pooch. ($50, Barnes & Noble)

‘Great Maps: The World’s Masterpieces Explored and Explained’ by Jerry Brotton

This collection of 64 highly detailed maps spanning “continents and centuries” is a “pleasure to peruse,” said Reader’s Digest. Historian Jerry Brotton digs deep, explaining why each map was created and who its audience was. The two-page spreads bring the illustrations to life, and anyone who enjoys “maps, data, visualization and history” will spend hours poring over the book. ($21, Amazon)

‘100 Hikes of a Lifetime U.S.A.: The Country’s Ultimate Scenic Trails’ by Stephanie Pearson

When choosing which quests to feature in her book, Stephanie Pearson selected some challenging ones that will test your mettle. She also included “incredible” opportunities that “aren’t necessarily long and difficult,” letting hikers of all abilities “see migrating birds, walk in the footsteps of ancient humans” or learn a “little-known slice of American history,” she told Outside. You’ll find extreme adventures, like the 6,800-mile American Discovery Trail from California to Delaware, alongside day hikes families can accomplish together. ($29, Amazon)

‘Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection’ by Slim Aarons and Shawn Waldron

After spending World War II as a U.S. Army photographer, Slim Aarons vowed to only take photos of “attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.” He stayed true to his word, famously shooting the “playgrounds of Gstaad and Mallorca, Bali and Beverly Hills,” said Vanity Fair. “Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection” features hundreds of his renowned portraits of “socialites and literary lights, royals and moguls, ingenues and artists,” and his focus on “tiny design elements” give “each frame an extra layer of texture, color and nuance.” ($121, Amazon)

‘There and Back: Photographs from the Edge’ by Jimmy Chin

Mountaineer and “Free Solo” director Jimmy Chin doesn’t shy from extremes, and “There and Back” is filled with “jaw-dropping imagery” from his adventures around the globe, said Condé Nast Traveler. The “soaring formations” of the Ennedi Desert in Chad and “frozen expanses” of Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land are some of the “thrilling” natural wonders featured in the book, which is “sure to inspire” the “adventurer in your life.” ($21, Amazon)

‘Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America’s National Parks’ by QT Luong

Every U.S. National Park shines in “Treasured Lands.” More than 600 vivid images show off the beauty of each spot, from the tight Slot Canyons of Zion to the jagged Grand Teton peaks reflected in the Schwabacher Landing pond. Photographer QT Luong took the pictures during all four seasons and in all kinds of weather, and explains in captions how and when each stunning visual was captured. ($90, Amazon)

‘Walk With Me: New York’ by Susan Kaufman

Everyone knows what the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge look like. In “Walk With Me: New York,” photographer Susan Kaufman captures a side of the city that postcards miss, turning her camera toward colorful stoops, charming park corners and quaint storefronts. It’s a fresh look at one of the world’s most photographed places. ($26, Amazon)

If the “gossip in publishing circles” has any merit, novelist Rachel Cusk has turned her eye to Natalie Portman for her latest book, said Leaf Arbuthnot in The Telegraph. The actor isn’t named in “Life of M”. But the similarities between the character “M” and Portman are “so glaring they become hard to ignore” – and the portrayal is far from complimentary.

An unflattering portrait

“Life of M”, which is published next month, is about a film star who allows an unnamed writer to chronicle her life. There are “certainly points of correspondence” between Portman and M in the novel, said John Self in The Times. M “played a ballerina” in a movie and is a “model for a major brand”; Portman starred in “Black Swan” and her face is splashed across billboards as the long-time ambassador for Miss Dior.

Cusk’s character was also a child actor whose first film included sexual scenes that “originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character”. Portman’s debut in “Leon” in 1994 saw her mother step in to insist scenes with her daughter and an older co-star were removed from the film.

Cusk has remained “tight-lipped” on the rumours. It’s “handy” to generate a buzz ahead of publication and the novelist has never been shy about putting “whoever she likes into her books”. Her divorce memoir “Aftermath” explored the breakdown of her marriage to her ex-husband in vivid detail, while her “bracingly honest” book about parenting, “A Life’s Work”, was widely criticised for her unflinching portrayal of motherhood. “It has reached the stage, in fact, where an effective modern curse might be ‘May you appear in a Rachel Cusk book’”.

Portman and Cusk both live in Paris, and move in similar circles. The actor is (or was) a fan of Cusk and even interviewed the writer, picking two of her novels to discuss in her Instagram book club. But “no one in her right mind who understood Rachel Cusk’s work would allow her to write about her”, said Valerie Stivers on UnHerd. Cusk excels at “reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold existential forces” – appearing in one of her books is “never going to be flattering”.

“As literary assassinations go, Cusk’s of M is sly and subtle, but it is lethal nonetheless,” said Arbuthnot in The Telegraph. Cusk stresses M is pretty, “humble” and “gracious”, but the “unsettling argument” she carefully builds is that “M is engaged in a constant effort to seem like a believable person”. What is “cruel” about the character is the “impregnable fort of isolation she believes the actress lives within”.

A ‘delicate balancing act’

Cusk is just the latest in a “long line of writers” to cause upset by basing their characters on real people, said Self in The Times. Philip Roth was a “master” at it, first casting a “thinly disguised avatar of his wife”, Claire Bloom, in his 1990 novel “Deception”, before he “twisted the knife”, with another caricature of Bloom, this time as a self-loathing antisemitic Jewish actor in “I Married a Communist”. And Nora Ephron famously wrote about her divorce from the journalist Carl Bernstein in her novel, “Heartburn”, which features a food writer who is seven months pregnant when she discovers her husband’s affair.

Non-writers assume we novelists insert real-life people into our books out of “spite”, said Amanda Craig in The i Paper, but a novel is “what it says on the tin – a work with made-up characters and situations”. My “long-ago ex-boyfriend”, the literary critic David Sexton, thought he had been “unflatteringly depicted” in my novel “A Vicious Circle” and “threatened to sue”. I might use a line of dialogue I’ve heard “uttered by a real-life person” but most writers I know “go through agonies” to make their characters who might “have their roots in reality as remote as possible from the original”.

Creating characters inspired by real people is a “delicate balancing act”, said Marshall Fine on BookTrib. Novelists run the risk of “being accused of writing a roman à clef, in which only the names have been changed to protect the guilty”. The “trick” is to find ways of using real people in creative ways to “inspire characters who are products of your imagination”.

While there is no legal requirement to seek permission from the real person who inspires a work of fiction, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain advises that it is “good practice” to inform subjects of creative writing projects in advance, to get their “blessing” to reduce the risk of future legal action, and to remove any “identifying information”.

For now, Cusk hasn’t addressed the rumours about “Life of M”, and unless the actor speaks out to “correct the record, the truth will never be known – nor can it really matter”, said Stivers on UnHerd. “If the result of the two women’s friendship is a very strong Cusk book indeed, everyone should be happy – including, if her art-appreciation is real, Natalie Portman.”

“I can’t imagine a world without books,” said Nicole Russell in USA Today. But most Americans already “live in that world.” That’s the “devastating” takeaway from a viral new story in The Atlantic, which details why “the age of reading is over.” It notes that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped more than 40% over 20 years — the decline cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels — and that fewer than half of adults read a single book a year. Reading progress for elementary students has stalled and only about a third of high school seniors are “proficient” at analyzing complex fictional themes. We can blame smartphones, social media, and short-form videos, all of which deliver “perpetual hits of dopamine” at the expense of the deeper analysis and comprehension gained by reading. It’s no wonder President Trump was re-elected, said Marsha Lederman in The Globe and Mail (Canada). When the electorate relies on TikTok for knowledge, “you get today’s dumbed-down, polarized world on fire.”

Reading is not “going extinct,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. Yes, fewer Americans are reading for pleasure, but those who do are reading more. Book sales are near-record highs; there are now 70% more independent bookstores than in 2020; and the amount of time that young Americans spend reading has actually crept up from 8.4 minutes a day in 2003 to 11.7 minutes in 2022. And let’s not pretend there was ever a golden age of reading, said Joel J. Miller in his Substack newsletter. In the supposedly idyllic pre-smartphone age, the best sellers were often genre junk and millions of Americans “read nothing, read little, read badly, or read mainly to kill time.” Worrying about the future is “easy to do when you romanticize the past.”

My worry is we’re not alarmed enough, said Rod Dreher in his Substack newsletter. Hitler came to power in a highly literate Germany, but the Nazis took advantage of movies and radio to push simple messages with immediate emotional impact. We know how that ended, and in our postliterate age, a future dictator would “have an incomparably easier time of it.” Don’t believe me? Consider “the college students who are being memed into hating Jews” by social media. And things will only get worse as more people use AI to digest, analyze, and make judgments on everything from study papers to legal documents and news reports. By giving up on the hard work of reading, Americans “are training themselves not to think, but to obey.”

In 2023, the South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son Paul. The pair had been shot at the family’s hunting estate; Murdaugh claimed to have discovered the bodies after returning from a visit to his mother.

It’s not hard to see why the case “gripped America”, said Robbie Millen in The Times. It involved the “privileged and powerful” – the Murdaughs were big cheeses in the South Carolina Lowcountry – and the man himself, known as “Big Red”, didn’t seem the murdering type: he appeared to be a “loving husband and doting father” with a charming “down-home manner”.

Yet as the novelist James Lasdun shows in this “elegant and intelligent” book, Murdaugh was in fact a fraudster who swindled millions out of clients and law firm colleagues, and was addicted to opioid painkillers. In “Family Man”, Lasdun does a “skilful job of juggling all the elements of the story, which takes some dark and ludicrous turns”.

Prosecutors claimed Murdaugh was driven to murder because his financial deceptions were about to be revealed, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. They said he believed that no one would launch proceedings against him while he was dealing with a “tragedy of such biblical proportions”.

At first, Lasdun was sceptical of this theory, refusing to believe that a man with no history of domestic violence could “bring himself to shoot loved ones merely to delay his own imminent financial exposure”. Yet in his “meticulous” retelling – the “prose is pure pleasure” – Lasdun comes to accept that “Big Red” was probably guilty, despite never reaching an “iron-clad conclusion”.

“More than 10 books about the Murdaughs have been published to date”, and HBO and Netflix have both released miniseries about the killings, said Orlando Whitfield in The New York Times. Lasdun “does not pretend to reveal new evidence about the murders”; instead, he relays the tale of the “fall of the house of Murdaugh” in often “staggering” detail.

While at times this threatens to become overwhelming, his approach does “illuminate, to devastating effect”, how the case encompassed many of the “direst aspects of contemporary American life: opioid addiction, litigiousness, brazen mendacity”. And the final chapters are “stunning”. Even now, “there’s more to come”, said Millen in The Times. This May, Murdaugh’s conviction was overturned on appeal, owing to jury interference. A retrial is expected. “I can’t wait to read Lasdun’s musings in an updated paperback.”

'Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth' by Samuel Moyn

“It is a safe bet that the AARP will not be promoting Gerontocracy in America to its 38 million members,” said Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic. The explosive growth of America’s over-65 population over the past several decades so alarms author Samuel Moyn that his dark prognosis of its consequences “casts a shadow on the very medical advances that enabled it.” The U.S. will soon be home for the first time to as many people over 65 as under 18. Meanwhile, those seniors are six times more likely to vote than 18-to-34-year-olds, and they tend to put their own interests first. Moyn, a Yale law professor, proposes a series of policies aimed at trimming back elder Americans’ political and financial clout. Unfortunately, compared with other variables affecting our politics, age “turns out to hold little explanatory power,” and many seniors are struggling themselves.

“Despite the sometimes acerbic tone of his book, Moyn’s aim isn’t to stick it to the old,” said Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Among his suggestions for rebalancing a system that seems to favor the old is to expand entitlements for seniors so that they don’t feel they must cling to housing and jobs to secure a comfortable final chapter in life. But Moyn does want the power of younger voters amplified. Currently, the median age for members of Congress is over 60 and the median age of voters in primaries is 65. To shift the balance toward youth, Moyn offers a range of potential remedies, including making voting a requirement, as Australia does, and even allowing young people to vote twice: once for themselves and a second time for fellow citizens who haven’t yet hit legal voting age.

When he focuses on the elderly’s domination of politics, “Moyn has a point,” said The Economist. There remains no good mechanism for getting rid of lawmakers such as former senator Dianne Feinstein, who was struggling to fulfill the basic demands of her job when she died in office at 90. But Moyn favors mandatory retirement ages in all professions, a policy that may make sense in academia, where some tenured professors hang onto their posts long after their productivity spirals, but less so in other fields, where employers tend to keep paying only those who remain top performers. Also, for a book that claims to stand for youth and progress, American Gerontocracy “often seems oddly conservative,” said Noah Berlatsky in Washington Monthly. Moyn is so certain that concentrated power in the hands of the elderly is unnatural that he’s willing to curtail seniors’ individual rights to restore what he sees as society’s natural order. Because of such radicalism, his is “not a book that will age well.”

'The Face: A Cultural History' by Fay Bound-Alberti

Until the invention of the mirror in the 17th century, said Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times, “most people’s own faces were likely foreign to them.” Fay Bound-Alberti’s “ambitious, entertaining” new book calls attention to how the rapid spread of the new technology likely changed every user’s sense of self, but she doesn’t dwell on that shift in consciousness because she has much other ground to cover. Surveying tens of thousands of years of how images of the human face have been produced and interpreted, she starts by informing us that artists depicted human figures long before they drew or sculpted human faces, then races through time all the way to today’s facial surveillance technologies. Though it’s not always clear what the book’s unifying argument might be, “the richness of the research more than compensates.”

Much of the action occurs over the past, said Max Liu in the Financial Times. While the Venus of Brassempouy, a tiny 25,000-year-old ivory sculpture found in France, is believed to be the oldest surviving depiction of a human face, it was not until the Renaissance that artists routinely attempted to capture in a subject’s face the sitter’s very soul. Bound-Alberti argues that many of the prejudices and presumptions we bring to reading faces spring from that moment, and her larger account, while consistently engaging, is “at its most compelling when it becomes polemical,” showing how the classism, racism, and sexism of that remote past still shape today’s punishing beauty standards.

Given how many of Bound-Alberti’s observations are grounded in fact, “it is a shame that The Face veers, chapter by chapter, into the abstract,” said Zoë Huxford in The New Statesman (U.K.). In the weakest chapter, a closing consideration of face transplants, she calls the very rare procedure an example of the commodification of the face taken to its extreme, and the interpretation simply doesn’t fit the evidence. “Still, The Face is a meticulously researched and unsettling book, and Bound-Alberti’s overarching message is poignant” — namely, that we should stop yearning for more perfect faces and instead seek a world that accepts the faces we have.

The blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic in September 2022 “has been called the greatest act of sabotage in modern times”, said Robert F. Worth in The New York Times. In one blow, the explosions ended Germany’s energy dependence on Russia – where the gas originated – and “set off a year-long argument about who was responsible”, with Russia, the US and Ukraine all identified as possible culprits.

Partly thanks to a “meticulous German police investigation, and partly because of some very dogged reporters”, we now know that Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency was responsible. Their motive was to “stop Germany from feeding Russia’s war machine with billions of dollars in annual gas payments”.

Bojan Pancevski, a US-based reporter who “spent years untangling the plot”, has now written a “spectacular book” about the bombings, which reads like a “police procedural”.

The team of divers – four men and one woman – who headed to Germany’s Baltic coast had “possibly the daftest cover story in the history of espionage”, said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph. If stopped, they were “ready to claim that they were making an aquatic-themed pornographic film”. But they weren’t, and “the bombs went like clockwork”, damaging three of the four pipelines beyond repair.

Because the pipelines lay 80 metres below the surface, beyond the reach of “even the best-trained special-forces divers”, the organisers recruited “civilian deep-sea divers” from Ukraine’s Black Sea diving fraternity, who practised for months in disused Ukrainian quarries. They escaped from Germany by van, and only one has been arrested (he’s to stand trial in Germany later this year).

These days, it is common for current affairs to be trumpeted with the phrase “reads like a thriller”. “‘The Nord Stream Conspiracy’ genuinely does.”

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the tomes piling up on your bedside table, try reaching for a novella instead. These slim, punchy books can be finished in a single day – and might just reignite your love of reading. Here are some of our favourites.

Assembly by Natasha Brown

Inspired by her career working in finance, Brown’s thrilling debut is just a hundred pages long and “written in vignettes that leave a lot of white space on the page”, said The Guardian. The story follows a young Black woman who “seems to have it all”: a great job, money, and a “loving, liberal, generationally wealthy boyfriend”. But simmering beneath the surface is a “desperate rage” at the racism and misogyny she navigates every day.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This “deeply strange” novel begins “conventionally enough”, with a quiet young woman leaving London to start afresh in a rural village, said The Guardian. But Townsend Warner “gleefully” changes tack when her heroine, Lolly Willowes, becomes a witch. “Smashing together” an array of genres from folk horror to nature writing, it’s a short but mighty book that helped cement its author as “one of the true originals of 20th-century English literature”.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Harvey’s “otherworldly” 140-page novel scooped the Booker Prize in 2024, proving longer doesn’t necessarily mean better, said Good Housekeeping. Set aboard the International Space Station, her “gorgeously written” book follows six astronauts orbiting Earth over 24 hours. Filled with beautiful prose and breathtaking imagery, she offers an “intriguing perspective on the human race’s treatment of our planet”. It’s a must-read.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Set in a small Irish town in the 1980s, this is a “quiet but deeply moving” story, said Daisy Lester in The Independent. It follows a “duteous father” who is confronted with the harrowing treatment of unmarried young women at the hands of the church at one of the country’s infamous Magdalene Laundries. “Haunting yet hopeful”, I devoured the entire book in “one short afternoon, but have been reflecting on it for far longer”.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Rhys’ “chilling, dreamlike” prequel to “Jane Eyre” explores another side to Charlotte Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic”, said Adrienne Westenfeld in Esquire. We meet the white Creole heiress, Antoinette Cosway, in Jamaica years before the events of Thornfield Hall. Isolated and lonely, she is soon “driven to despair” by the cruelty of her new husband Edward Rochester. Rhys’ book is just 176 pages long; packed with “gorgeous imagery and turbulent emotions”, it will roll over you like a “hazy island fever dream”.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Moore expertly captures “female adolescence and the intensity of its friendships” in her “luscious and funny” book, said The Economist. The action follows Berie as she looks back at the “small, wild joys of her teenage years”, and tries to figure out how her life has become so “staid and unfulfilling”. She begins to see the “mockery and rebellion” she and her best friend had loved as “callow answers to teenage insecurities” – but her story still “vibrates with regret for what she has lost”.

While everything from algebra to essay writing may have been covered in school, a subject area often left off the curriculum is personal finance. Unfortunately, most people are far more likely to run into questions of budgeting and investing than, say, calculating the area of a triangle (some professions aside).

The good news: It is never too late to play catch-up. And with these personal finance books, doing so does not have to feel like homework.

‘Get Good with Money: Ten Simple Steps to Becoming Financially Whole’ by Tiffany Aliche

This book by financial educator Tiffany Aliche, aka “The Budgetnista,” offers a breakdown of financial foundations and daily money habits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her moniker, the book helps with establishing a baseline budget, but it also offers guidance on other staples like saving, investing, insurance coverage, credit scores and more. Ultimately, Aliche succeeds in presenting an “ethos of financial wholeness that rejects the unnecessary complexity and unrealistic nature of traditional financial advice,” said U.S. News & World Report.

‘Your Money or Your Life’ by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

This book encourages readers to get clear about their personal values around money. “The simple premise: How much money are you willing to trade your life for? Whenever you’re working, you’re trading your life and energy for money. What does that mean to you?” said Grant Sabatier, a personal finance blogger, to The Strategist. The idea is that “once you’re clear on the ‘why’ behind your saving and spending, making decisions about investing and budgeting becomes much easier,” said the outlet.

‘The Intelligent Investor’ by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig

Once your budget and debts are ironed out, you are in a good place to start investing, a practice foundational to building wealth. This book was originally published in 1949, though it has since been updated and now remains a classic for a reason. It provides a guide to “investing for individuals looking to develop sensible strategies and protect their investments,” said GOBankingRates. Business magnate Warren Buffett has called it “by far the best book about investing ever written.”

‘The Psychology of Money’ by Morgan Housel

The “biggest impediment for most people building wealth is their emotional decisions that get in the way of doing what should provide the greatest outcomes,” said Mitchell Kraus, a financial planner with Capital Intelligence, to The Wall Street Journal. This book helps readers learn the signs of those pitfalls so they can better steer clear of them. Think of it less as a how-to guide and more as a psychological unpacking and broader money mindset shift.

‘Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together’ by Erin Lowry

This book is for the millennials out there (though there is a good chance other generations may relate — looking at you, Gen Z). It is “aimed at 20- and 30-somethings who are dealing with both paying off debt and beginning to plan for the future,” said The Strategist. There are chapters on everything from navigating the decision of whether to move back in with your parents to making preparations for retirement.

The best cookbooks can be read from multiple directions. A compendium of utilitarian recipes that can be both browsed and zeroed in on. An anthropological telescope through which you gape at a cuisine. The history of a food told through a kitchen aperture.

If a cookbook achieves one of those objectives, it warrants consideration. If it attains all three, the angels sing, the pots clang and the fridge door swings wide open. Rachel Roddy’s “An A-Z of Pasta: Recipes for Shapes and Sauces from Alfabeto to Ziti, and Everything in Between” is that style of cookbook.

Pasta, then and now

Roddy, a Brit who has lived in Rome for the last 20-odd years, notes that only a “genius or an idiot” would try to gather the stories of the “350 to 600, depending on who you talk with” pasta shapes used across Italy. “I am neither, at least not in this context, so I haven’t tried,” she writes.

You could wager she is instead both a genius and an idiot. With the valiant undertaking of “An A-Z of Pasta,” she does the near-impossible: She captures, across 50 pasta shapes, the lifeblood of an ever-shifting subject.

In the chapter on paccheri, those chunky, dried elongated tubes akin to rigatoni on ’roids, Gragnano, a town near Naples, is the main character. You learn that in the 18th century there were “22 mills and 97 pasta factories” in the area. Now there are “23 pasta factories,” only some of which “bear the mark Pasta di Gragnano DOC, that Gragnano is the city of pasta.” The present clings to the past, like fava bean pesto should adhere to al dente paccheri.

The entry on busiate jumps even further back, to 12,000 years ago, when wheat was first domesticated, then on to cultivated wheat’s appearance in Italy in 6500 B.C. Sumerians, Greeks, Arabs, Vikings; Greek and Roman texts, plus the Jerusalem Talmuds — all played their part in pasta’s ascendance as a commonplace food.

Flip to the “L”s, and we time-warp to the present, as Roddy sits with a pasta maker in the region of Le Marche, “examining uncooked pasta like dermatologists, admiring the pores and rugosity.” She offers a recipe for linguine, dressed in a silken sauce of thinly-sliced onion and zucchini, egg yolks and Parmesan. If this is food-history whiplash, bring on the 17-car pileup.

Bags of opportunity

Should your pasta pantry be forever stocked with an array of shapes, like a menagerie of delicious rigidity, flip through “An A-Z of Pasta” and be astounded. You might gasp and nod so much at the book’s recipes, that your jaw remains unhinged and your head frozen in descent.

Those wagon wheels, aka ruote, untouched because you cannot quite figure out how to use them? Drape them with Gorgonzola, sage and walnuts, or mascarpone and, again, walnuts. Jaded by your staple spaghetti with tomato sauce? Wander the week with nine tomato-based recipes, tripping from a raw sauce with dried oregano, to spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato and ricotta salata, to the apotheosis of leftovers, a frittata made with day-old spaghetti and tomato sauce.

Pasta will tell you how it wants to be treated in the kitchen, if you listen. Roddy, with “The A-Z of Pasta,” teaches you the foodstuff’s centuries-old language. Lend an ear, and put some water on to boil.

The best newly published holiday reads.

All In by Claire Powell

Very few authors write about “contemporary Englishness as astutely, mercilessly and affectionately as Claire Powell”, said The Guardian. In “All In”, she “puts her perfectly observed characters in the pressure cooker” of an all-inclusive family holiday, creating a “kind of meta-beach read”. Best known for “At the Table” (2022), Powell has a knack for creating “characters you feel you really know”, said The Times. “Funny and moving”, this is a “brilliant summer read”.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli

From “drug addiction to choosing unsuitable lovers, Liza Minnelli inherited plenty” from her mother Judy Garland, said The Telegraph. It has made for a fascinating life, which she documents in an “intimate, chatty style” in this “rip-roaring memoir”. The most vivid sections focus on Garland, whose mood swings Minelli had to manage as a teenager, said The Sunday Times. But Minnelli’s love life also “makes for anecdotes galore”.

Transcription by Ben Lerner

On his way to interview his literary hero, the narrator of “Transcription” drops his iPhone in the sink. He has no means to record the conversation, but presses ahead with the interview anyway. From this simple premise unfolds an “intelligent, absorbing” study that “plays with the boundary between the truth and fiction”, said the Financial Times. A deserving winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, this “compact and endlessly surprising” novel “exerts a powerful grip”, said The Times.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

The “Hamnet” author’s latest is set in Ireland just after the Great Famine, and begins with the story of a cartographer and his son surveying a windswept peninsula, said The Independent. “Moving and magnificent”, it is O’Farrell’s “most ambitious book to date”. Incorporating elements of folklore and the supernatural, this is a “gripping” work about a land and its people, said London’s The Standard. “You’ll struggle to look up” from it while on holiday.

Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler

“From reporting on the first ascent of Everest in 1953 to transitioning in the 1970s”, Jan Morris led a “unique and astonishing” life, said the Financial Times. And it is superbly captured by Sara Wheeler in this “engrossing authorised biography”. For all that she was trail-blazing, Morris was “not a lovely person”, said The Times: “she was sharp-elbowed, slapdash, imperious and narcissistic”. It’s to Wheeler’s credit that she acknowledges such traits in her “sympathetic but candid biography”.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

When Zac Brettler, a middle-class 19-year-old, fell to his death from a Thames-side apartment in 2019, police initially treated his death as suicide, said The Telegraph. But this “extraordinary” work of investigative journalism presents a darker, more complex take. At once a portrait of a family’s grief and of “a city at a particular point in its history”, said the Financial Times, “London Falling” is “a masterpiece” from the award-winning author of “Empire of Pain”.

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

There can’t be many romantic novels that feature “Boris Johnson’s ICU stay”, said The Guardian. But in this “treasure” of a book, Jessica Stanley braids the personal and political as she chronicles the relationship between copywriter Coralie and journalist Adam. Full of “on-the-nose” references, this is a “stellar summer read”, said The Times.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

This epistolary novel about a 73-year-old retired lawyer who lives alone in Maryland was a “startling word-of-mouth success”, said The Times. “When you read it you’ll understand why.” Sybil, the protagonist, is someone “you want to spent hours with”, said The Independent. The winner of this year’s Women’s Prize For Fiction, this book is the “best kind of summer read”.

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

When a group of friends holds a murder mystery party and one is found dead, we seem set for a conventional “whodunnit”, said The New York Times. But this “terrific debut” works on several levels: part “knowing homage to classic detective fiction”, it’s also a “sensitive examination” of grief. It’s the “most original crime novel you’ll read all year”, said The Guardian.

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Fiona Sampson’s new book, Becoming George, is a biography of the cross-dressing 19th-century writer George Sand. Below, the award-winning poet and author of Two-Way Mirror, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, recommends six other life stories.

‘How to End a Story’ by Helen Garner (2025)

Journal extracts from the Australian author create a compelling portrait of the nation’s counterculture, 1980s feminism, and, latterly, an abusive relationship with a fellow writer. But above all, this page-turner by one of today’s great nonfiction writers is alert to the glories and terrors of daily inner life. Buy it here.

‘The Years’ by Annie Ernaux (2008)

Not so much a group biography as the autobiography of the author’s generation, The Years examines the life choices, culture, and politics of France’s Baby Boomers. Ernaux, the surprise French Nobel winner, packs this absorbing panorama with domestic, academic, and pop-cultural details. Buy it here.

‘Come Back in September’ by Darryl Pinckney (2022)

Pinckney, writing like a gossipy angel, captures the fun and anxiety of a high-octane life at the heart of New York City’s literary village in the 1970s and ’80s. Come Back is both self-portrait of the artist as a young gay Black man, and a nuanced homage to his mentor, the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Buy it here.

‘A Fortunate Man’ by John Berger and Jean Mohr (1967)

In 1966, writer John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr spent three months following a country doctor through picturesque landscapes made famous by Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” as the doctor ministered, often futilely, to the rural poor. Evocative images and writing lyrical with anger capture a lifetime’s devotion and its cost. The “fortunate man” went on to kill himself. Buy it here.

‘Hold Still’ by Sally Mann (2015)

It seems unjust that a photographer as visionary as Mann should also be able to write. But she truly can. This story of her emergence as a photographer—as well as a wife, mother, and farmer—always sends me running back to my desk. Buy it here.

‘Flush’ by Virginia Woolf (1933)

The evergreen Flush is a life portrait both of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and of her adored pet spaniel. Barrett Browning helped transform 19th-century verse, and as her biographer, I should probably mind this approach. But as a dog lover, I’m delighted. Buy it here.

‘Villa Coco’ by Andrew Sean Greer

Personal style that appears effortless often requires much invisible work, said Jacob Brogan in The Atlantic. “I thought about this distinction often while reading Andrew Sean Greer’s witty and, yes, stylish new novel.” The narrator, an American, is looking back on a sojourn in Tuscany when he was hired to work at the home of a scheming 92-year-old baronessa. But he also comes under the sway of other larger-than-life characters, including a male romantic interest, resulting in a “relentlessly charming” coming-of-age tale. Because Greer “has such a light touch,” the book “reads like a grand adventure, not a lesson,” said Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Perhaps because the Pulitzer-winning author of 2017’s Less has earned the privilege, Villa Coco “has the summery feel of someone writing whatever he feels like writing.” I have zero complaints—“other than that I wish it were longer.”

‘Rasputin Swims the Potomac’ by Ben Fountain

“Is it even possible to write a satirical novel about American politics anymore?” asked Laura Miller in Slate. If so, Ben Fountain, the author of the Iraq War–era send-up Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, “is a good candidate to try.” This time out, Fountain gives us a U.S. president who could only be Donald Trump plotting to win an unconstitutional third term by tapping as his running mate a wrestler named Rasputin. But a billionaire cabal prefers Rasputin at the top of the ticket, and as the drama levels up, Fountain’s prose “fizzes with a Dickensian color that makes the novel a blast to read.” A novel that also features a likable reality TV star turned White House staffer, a reporter named Clarence Thomas Jr., and a weeping epidemic is “a lot, for sure,” said Michael Schaub in the Los Angeles Times. “But Fountain pulls it off with his gleefully absurd sense of humor.”

‘Dolly All the Time’ by Annabel Monaghan

“Romance readers have found their book of the summer,” said Kimberly Ramirez in Los Angeles magazine. “A radiant and tension-filled love story,” Annabel Monaghan’s latest best seller revolves around a single mom and kindergarten teacher who’s pushing 40 when she returns to her Rhode Island hometown for the warmer months and agrees to a wealthy heir’s suggestion that she pose as his girlfriend. Because Dolly prizes her independence and they both have family burdens, the novel develops into a “gripping” read “packed with passion and doubt.” When the pair strike their deal, “only the truly inattentive will be shocked that complications ensue,” said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. That’s fine, because “the settings—sailboats, lush gardens, elegant townhouses—couldn’t be lovelier,” and resourceful Dolly “deserves every nice thing that seems to be coming her way.”

‘The Children’ by Melissa Albert

“Contemporary fantasy could certainly do with more sophisticated takes on the genre like this one,” said Jessie Lethaby in The Times (U.K.). Melissa Albert’s first foray into adult fiction hooks the reader from the moment it introduces its protagonist, Guinevere, a woman who was made famous as a child by her mother’s fantasy novels and is now releasing a dishonestly rosy memoir about her upbringing. Albert takes too long to bring the story to resolution, but as The Children advances along three timelines, there’s no denying “the sheer pleasure” of the reading experience. All along, you wonder how the fire started that killed Guinevere’s parents, said Lucy Rees in the Chicago Review of Books, and why she and her artist brother have long been estranged. “The answers converge with the meeting of the timelines in a sequence of pages so dazzling I had to take breaks to seep in the complexities.”

‘Pool House’ by Mary H.K. Choi

“Brace for the kind of heartbreak reserved for mothers and daughters who have more in common than they care to admit,” said Elisabeth Egan in The New York Times. When a former TV actor dies by suicide, his beautiful Korean American co-star and Stevie, her 20-year-old daughter, open their L.A. home to another of the show’s co-stars, who, to Stevie, is both a brother figure and a longtime crush. The house is unaffordable. Stevie wants out but can’t escape her mother’s orbit. And the domestic drama that then unfolds feels “unexpectedly perilous.” In reality, Stevie and her mom have been renting out their home and living in its pool house, said P. Claire Dodson in Vogue. As Choi tracks this unusual Hollywood trio, “Choi writes like she’s inviting you inside the joke, to the blood and sweat that make up the fame machine and the lives within it.”

‘The Shampoo Effect’ by Jenny Jackson

In her “deeply satisfying” new rom-com, Jenny Jackson “flips the usual romance novel progression of initial friction-laced attraction that melts into undeniable love,” said Carol Iaciofano Aucoin in WBUR.org. Caroline, a New York City–based writer, and Van, an environmental scientist, hook up shortly after Caroline arrives in a Massachusetts shore town, and the suspense lies in whether the pair will be torn apart, particularly after Van learns that he’s impregnated a member of his tight local friend group. The scandal, the sex, and the coastal setting “make for a perfect summer beach read,” said Julia Vitale in Air Mail. After all the complications, The Shampoo Effect emerges as “a breezy, fun novel whose ending is tied with a neat bow, as all endings of books read between Memorial Day and Labor Day should be.”

‘The end of reading is here’

Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic

“Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to,” says Rose Horowitch. Even “demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women and college graduates — have seen a collapse,” and the “books that people do read are simpler than they used to be.” People are “losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension.” America “isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.” The “people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age.”

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‘A tax too far: Don’t punish immigrants sending money to family’

Marcos Cruz at The Hill

Immigrants “want to know how to safely transfer money to relatives” overseas, as these remittances “create a massive flow of capital out of wealthy nations and into lower- and middle-income countries,” says Marcos Cruz. This year, a “new 1% excise tax was added on money sent abroad,” and “although a 1% tax appears small when expressed as a decimal, its implications are strategic.” By “taxing remittances and lowering incomes,” Washington will have “worsened the root cause of the immigration problem.”

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‘The US had the biggest opportunity in the history of American soccer. They wasted it.’

Alexander Abnos at The Guardian

What do people think “about what the U.S. produced on Monday night during their 4-1 defeat against Belgium?” says Alexander Abnos. What “inspiration was there to be found in the team’s disjointed moves forward, of the missed defensive assignments, of the lack of poise the team played with?” Millions were “tuning in on Monday night for their first U.S. men’s national team experience,” and “their first impression was a side that was not up to the task.”

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‘Stop mourning the old NATO. Build the new one.’

Galip Dalay at Time

This “must be the moment Europe stops mourning the alliance it once knew and begins building the one it actually needs,” says Galip Dalay. Europe should “strengthen the collective weight of European NATO members, not the European Union members or EU as an institution alone, within the alliance.” Europe “needs a continent-wide security architecture” and an “honest reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: any post-American security framework cannot simply replicate the existing NATO-centric order.”

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“What can there possibly be left in the Sedaris backstory that the writer hasn’t already mined?” asked Emma Brockes in The Guardian. The American humourist has written nine volumes of essays over his decades-long career, which leaves you wondering whether he’s “suffering from a problem that comes to all writers in the end” – a “dearth of usable material”.

But his latest collection reveals that he hasn’t run out of ideas yet. While reading Sedaris is a “glitchier experience” than it once was, his “tone still charms, even as it advances to a state of crankiness that makes him look like a gay Larry David”.

In the 28 pieces that make up “The Land and its People”, Sedaris sticks to his tried-and-tested formula of harvesting from “everyday experiences with his husband, Hugh, his siblings and his friends”. The book is peppered with “laugh-out-loud moments”, like his experience of a No Kings protest against Trump in which he finds himself “baffled by his fellow protesters’ lack of focus”. But there are also sections that “an editor could have put a red line through”, where he veers into an “occasionally too rote adoption of the grumpy-old-man trope”.

Inevitably some of the essays “have more going for them, and more in them, than others”, said Roddy Doyle in The New York Times. Is it as funny as his earlier books? “We’re very lucky to have both.” Sedaris has grown older and the “world seems weirder”. That’s why I love reading his work: “for him, being alive has always been strange and atrocious, contradictory, unfair and hilarious”. Now approaching 70, he “examines ageing with the same vigour, curiosity and grim glee” that brought his other books to life.

It is when he reflects on the “minutiae of everyday life” that his writing “really shines”, said Buzz Magazine. Whether he’s “documenting a humdrum car journey” or “arguing in bad French with an AI assistant on Duolingo”, Sedaris remains a “masterful storyteller” who is “always outrageous and highly entertaining company”.

Sometimes “ill-tempered and frequently hilarious”, he brings readers with him on a “touchingly honest journey through life’s peaks and troughs”, and continues to “mine gold from both the mundane and absurd”.

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It is unseasonably warm in some parts of the world, and the indoors beckons as many of us try to escape the heat. A few of this month’s new books will make the perfect companion for some cool summer reading. July’s releases include the highly anticipated conclusion of Colson Whitehead’s trilogy and an author’s first foray into romantasy.

‘How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words’ by Sophia Smith Galer

Nonfiction fans will find journalist Sophia Smith Galer’s “erudite exploration” of what she dubs ‘systemic linguicide’ fascinating, said Publishers Weekly. The number of languages that have ever existed is “placed at between 31,000 and 140,000,” but at most “only 4,000 will remain by the 22nd century, about half of the current total.”

Moreover, many of them “will not have died natural deaths” but will have been “killed off.” Smith Galer “weaves together heart-wrenching accounts” of those who have “suffered linguicide.” The collection of personal accounts creates a “spirited reconsideration of language as a natural resource that must be protected.” (July 7, $33, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Dominion’ by Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok, who is best known for “contemporary family dramas” like “Girl in Translation” and “Searching for Sylvie Lee,” “swerves into romantasy with this Chinese mythology-infused epic,” said The New York Times. “Dominion” is the first book in a planned trilogy that follows Rubi Morningtail, a refugee who lost her memory after a demonic attack.

Kwok’s romantasy debut has been described as “‘Fourth Wing’ meets ‘The Hunger Games,’” Jezebel said. The story is a cornucopia of genre favorites: “romance, action, magic, politics, a broody hero, a heroine coming into her own and a fierce mythical companion animal.” (July 14, $32, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Cool Machine’ by Colson Whitehead

The highly anticipated conclusion of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Trilogy” arrives this summer. Following 2021’s “Harlem Shuffle” and 2023’s “Crook Manifesto,” readers with an “appetite for Whitehead’s noir fiction and stylishly exuberant storytelling” are rewarded with an “atmospheric, stylish finale,” said The Independent. Whitehead brings 1980s New York to “vivid, unforgettable life.” (July 21, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir’ by Matthew Quick

In this “deeply personal” memoir, South Carolina novelist Matthew Quick, author of “The Silver Linings Playbook,” reflects on his public success and “private struggles with depression, addiction and the lingering wounds of a fraught relationship with his father,” said Southern Living. As his father’s dementia progresses, Quick “confronts his past and races to find healing and reconciliation before it’s too late.” (July 21, $30, Simon and Schuster, Amazon)

‘Fishbone Cinderella’ by Elizabeth Lim

Young adult fiction author Elizabeth Lim makes her adult debut with a “historical fantasy inspired by the Chinese version of Cinderella,” in which magical fish bones replace a fairy godmother, said Literary Hub. The “multigenerational tale” takes place across two timelines: 1940s occupied Hong Kong and 1960s San Francisco.

The story follows a Chinese girl who “only manages to escape the Japanese soldiers during the Sino-Japanese War by turning invisible” and, in turn, learns of a family curse that could be related to her newfound magic, said Book Riot. (July 28, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

Whether you are after memoirs or analysis, here are the most compelling business books to pick up this summer.

1873 by Liaquat Ahamed

A “lively and compelling” account of how America’s Gilded Age economy broke the world, says The New York Times. Action sweeps from America’s railroad barons to Vienna’s stock market crash. Ahamed tackles “one of the great forgotten financial crises”, combining the nuances of high finance with some excellent vignettes, says Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. The cast of characters, says The Wall Street Journal, ranges from the Rothschild clan to a “still-obscure” Karl Marx.

Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

How did a 19th-century Japanese playing-card manufacturer become one of the most influential companies in the entertainment world, asks Stephen Bush in the FT. This “engaging” history of the home of Mario, Zelda and Pokémon, by The Guardian’s video games editor, is a delight whether you’re a gamer or not.

Suing the Kremlin by Martin Sixsmith

“If you want to see Vladimir Putin’s soul, study the fate of Yukos,” says The Economist. An early indicator of his “authoritarian turn” was the “seizure and dismemberment” of the Russian oil giant and imprisonment of its boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Here, Sixsmith, a former BBC Moscow correspondent, charts how shareholders fought back. “Their unlikely champion was a cheery, phlegmatic London-based tax lawyer, Tim Osborne.”

Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs by Lloyd Blankfein

This memoir, from the “ultimate Goldman insider”, doesn’t quite break the bank’s “blood oath” of silence, says Literary Review. But it’s interesting on Blankfein’s ascent from working-class New York, and includes a “vivid retelling of the desperate days of September 2008”. Blankfein emerges as a “straight-arrow guy”.

Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes

This history examines the everyday finances, food and working practices of ordinary Romans in “thrilling detail”, said the FT. Don’t be put off by the 35 bar charts, said the Times Literary Supplement. This is “that rarest of birds”: an “utterly gripping piece of economic history”.

Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman

“A brief, deft account” of one of the most consequential family feuds of recent corporate history, says the FT – and the costs of elevating just one child to run the empire.

Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto by Barry Eichengreen

In this “timely book”, Eichengreen – an expert on the international monetary system – puts today’s concerns about the global role of the dollar into historical context, says the FT. Technological change is important, but it all depends on “trust”.

From a very modern romantic entanglement to an epic tale of power and class in Pakistan, here are some of the most exciting debut novels of the year so far.

Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly

In his 2021 memoir, “Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?”, Derry-born journalist Séamas O’Reilly applied “gallows humour” to the death of his mother, said Michael Delgado in Literary Review. In his “slim but impressive” first novel, he adopts a similar approach, finding comedy in “the Troubles and the shadow they continue to cast”. The action – set in present-day Derry – centres on the disappearance of “glamorous American actress” Monica Logue, who came to the city to film a 1980s-set crime series, said Miriam Balanescu in The Spectator. Featuring a “cacophony of voices” (each chapter is narrated by a different townsperson), this is a “thoughtful novel” from a “startlingly perceptive writer”. O’Reilly doesn’t fully pursue the “missing-actor thread”, said Joanna Quinn in The Guardian. Some may wish he had given it “more prominence”. But his main goal is to create a “patchwork portrait of the city”. Full of “gloriously vivid” writing, and insights about how Northern Ireland’s past misfortunes are recreated and commodified in the present day, “Prestige Drama” is a “brilliant” debut.

I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder

Jem Calder – who grew up in Essex before moving to London 10 years ago – is a writer much concerned with the “specific indignities of living in the capital”, said Laura Hackett in The Times. Both his 2022 story collection, “Reward System”, and now this debut novel are full of observations about “extortionate rent, overpriced coffees and fickle trends”. Chuck, 35, is a copywriter who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. At a party, he meets 23-year-old barista Joey, and they begin a “halting relationship” – one driven by their shared ambition to be writers. “Calder is brilliant at parsing the nuanced power dynamics of this situationship”; he’s a writer of “genuine talent”. “Frustrated romantic entanglements” are hardly rare in novels, but “I Want You to Be Happy” also presents a “hyper-specific chronicle of the current moment”, said Natalie Perman in Literary Review. “A significant plotline involves the opening of a branch of Gail’s”; characters spend “a lot of time” on WhatsApp. Impressively, Calder makes us care about what happens; and his “humour lands”.

Upward Bound by Woody Brown

Woody Brown is a 28-year-old with a severe form of autism, which means he’s unable to speak or type, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian. And yet, he has produced a “triumphant first novel”, about a “non-speaking” person like himself and his experiences at Upward Bound, a “dismal adult daycare centre” in Los Angeles. Told from multiple perspectives, the novel is essentially a “series of vivid character sketches”, although it builds to a climax when a “client” of Upward Bound escapes. Both a “garrulous, charming story of a young man who can’t speak, and an inclusive, friendly guide to the overlooked and the isolated”, it is “moving and ringing with life”. It is controversial, though, said Laura Hackett in The Times. Brown communicates using a system known as “rapid prompting”, which involves him pointing at a letter board. Some say helpers can influence the process – others even suggest that his mother wrote the book. Yet even if you ignore its background, the novel “stands proudly on its own”. It offers a “fascinating insight” into the mind of a non-speaking autistic person, and is “genuinely entertaining”.

Discipline by Larissa Pham

This “spare” debut tells of a “lapsed art student”, Christine, who’s touring America to promote her own first novel, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. That book is a revenge fantasy about the former art school professor who seduced her, discarded her and destroyed her confidence as a painter. On her travels she shares her story with a variety of interesting characters. But all roads lead to a confrontation with the professor on an island off Maine, at which point the book “acquires Stephen King vibes”. Will Christine, like her protagonist, resort to murder? “Thickly pigmented” with suspense, Discipline shows that Larissa Pham “is a writer to keep a close eye on”. Pham’s “spiky” novel provides rich insights into the art world, said Ceci Browning in The Sunday Times. It’s “splattered with colourful descriptions of artists’ materials and references to specific paintings that will have you gleefully googling them”. On the surface, it’s about the aftermath of an illicit affair: but, as with a painting, “far more can be revealed with a longer, more thorough look”.

This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Writers who leave a long gap between books run the risk of being forgotten, said John Self in The Times. But I think Daniyal Mueenuddin “will get away with it”. The Pakistani-American author published his first book – the short-story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” – in 2009. It was widely acclaimed, and he was hailed as “Pakistan’s answer to Chekhov”. Now, 17 years later, comes his first novel, a “sweeping parable of power and fortune” set in Pakistan in the decades following Partition. Filled with “lovingly created characters”, it more than “lives up to expectations” – and is sure to be “all over the prize lists later this year”. Divided into four self-contained sections, the novel immerses us in a semi-feudal world where “property and influence are everything”, said Lucy Popescu in The Observer. We meet those at the top, and those at the bottom – and observe their fraught, often complex interactions. The prose is “exquisite, lush” and “evocative”. It really is an “exceptional novel”, said Stevie Davies in Literary Review. “From the opening pages, I knew I held a masterpiece in my hands.”

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

Clo, the protagonist of this “diverting” debut, is a lowly assistant at a New York fashion magazine, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times. She starts out as a “classic outsider”, who’s often mocked by her snobbish colleagues. But while she poses as a “self-deprecating storyteller”, she’s actually ruthlessly ambitious – and has an “ample amoral streak”. Caroline Palmer, a former Vogue staffer, “brings impeccable insider knowledge to her takedown of the absurdities and indignities” of the glossy magazine world. The novel is too long – and sometimes loses “propulsion” – but it’s “often punchily funny”. Any novel set at a Vogue-like magazine will inevitably draw comparisons with “The Devil Wears Prada”, said Alex Beggs in The New York Times. Yet “Workhorse” feels closer to a more “sinister story, with a paranoid and untrustworthy antihero”: “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. Palmer is a witty writer, and her observations are “razor-sharp”, said Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. Still, it’s quite an ask to spend 560 pages in the head of such a “seething, grasping” central character.

This, My Second Life by Patrick Charnley

In 2021, a “near-fatal cardiac arrest” left Patrick Charnley with a brain injury, said Tilda Coleman in The Telegraph. The former lawyer draws on this experience in his “impressive” debut – about a 20-year-old who has just suffered a similar injury. Needing to lead a simple life, Jago has returned to the Cornish village where he grew up, to help his uncle on his farm. It’s not a novel in which a great deal happens (though there is “some plot”, involving a local drug dealer). Charnley’s aim, rather, is to convey the “limitations of life after such an event” – and this he does “expertly”. Like his mother, the late poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, he has a “mellow, pared-back style”. Although this novel is inspired by Charnley’s experiences (as he acknowledges in a brief preface), to see it mainly “through the lens of personal trauma would be to do it a grave injustice”, said Christobel Kent in The Guardian. It succeeds as a work of art: written in “spare and beautiful” prose, it’s as “finely wrought as poetry, luminous with Jago’s sheer delight in the world”. This is a work of “piercing intensity”.

The life of Juan Carlos I, Spain’s 88-year-old former king, has been one of “richly deserved triumph followed by richly deserved disgrace”, said Jim Lawley in The Spectator. And it’s a life that is superbly charted by Paul Preston in this “magisterial” biography.

Born in Rome in 1938, Juan Carlos was the son of Don Juan de Borbon, the exiled heir to the Spanish throne. Aged 10, he was sent back to Spain by his father, to be indoctrinated in the “political tenets” of Spain’s fascist leader, General Franco – who’d intimated that this could pave the way for a “restoration of an authoritarian monarchy”. Taking a close interest in the prince’s education, Franco would regularly lecture his charge “on the mistakes made by previous Spanish monarchs”.

It was a “very lonely” childhood, but Juan Carlos emerged as Franco’s chosen successor, and was proclaimed king after Franco’s death in 1975. Contrary to the dictator’s wishes, he then set about initiating democratic reform. In 1981, his “supreme test came” when he faced down a military coup. “Grateful Spaniards poured out onto the streets”, to hail the king who’d saved their democracy.

If the first half of this book “tells the tale of a lonely boy who turns into a noble king”, then the second “tells of his transformation from noble king into corrupt sleazebag”, said Craig Brown in The Sunday Times.

Having always been “something of a playboy”, Juan Carlos married Princess Sofia of Greece in 1962. But that didn’t staunch his appetite for what Preston calls “industrial-scale adulteries”. Although estimates vary, according to the highest figure mentioned he has slept with 4,786 different women – a voraciousness matched by his talent for procuring mammoth “gifts” from Middle Eastern rulers ($10 million from the Shah of Iran; $100 million from the Saudis), and a taste for “bear hunts and elephant hunts”. In 2014, “beset by political scandal and ill health”, he was “obliged to abdicate in favour of his son, Felipe”. Since 2023, he has lived in Abu Dhabi.

“Preston’s narrative is perhaps needlessly haunted by the question ‘Why?’,” said Jeremy Treglown in Literary Review. Seeking psychological reasons for Juan Carlos’ self-indulgence, he writes of the “strain of having to please two antagonistic masters” – his father and General Franco – and describes a horrifying accident in his late teens, when he fatally shot his “intellectually more able” younger brother while playing a game with an ornamental pistol. Yet the references to his “damaged psyche” don’t seem altogether convincing. “You don’t need to have read ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘King Lear’ to know that some men just go nuts.”

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Deborah Lutz, a professor of Victorian literature and culture, is the author of six books, including The Brontë Cabinet and This Dark Night, a new biography of Emily Brontë. Below, Lutz recommends six books for lovers of biographies.

‘Virginia Woolf’ by Hermione Lee (1996)

Woolf composed her great modernist novels and her brilliant essays while troubled by suicidal thoughts and the tumult of two world wars. Lee’s portrait, searching and moving, first sparked my enthusiasm about biographies as histories of eras and of minds. Buy it here.

‘Survival Is a Promise’ by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2024)

This book is a poetic love letter to writer, poet, philosopher, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. Gumbs makes the case that Lorde’s community organizing, teaching, and radical feminist lesbianism had a cosmic reach. She convinced me. This book also sent me back to reading Lorde’s marvelous poetry. Buy it here.

‘The Brontës’ by Juliet Barker (1994)

A giant, door stopping account of an entire literary family, Barker’s book is a monumental achievement. But it is also riveting and tragic, telling of the passions, failures, and early deaths of the four Brontë siblings, with a specific focus on Emily and Charlotte, the authors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Buy it here.

‘Margaret Fuller’ by Megan Marshall (2013)

Fuller, an early feminist, played a central role in many progressive movements in 19th century America, including abolition and prison reform. In this deeply researched and absorbing life story, Marshall places Fuller among the famous thinkers of her day and proves that Fuller should be as famous as they are. Buy it here.

‘Super-Infinite’ by Katherine Rundell (2022)

A short account of the life and times of the Elizabethan poet John Donne, Rundell’s book bristles with energy and vivid set pieces. She tells of his many lives—scholar, clergyman, diplomat, and adventurer—and carries the reader into the courts and brothels of London. Buy it here.

‘Jane Austen’ by Claire Tomalin (1997)

It is easy to imagine a dull biography of Austen, since, apart from writing her great novels, not much happened in her life. Brisk and amusing, Tomalin’s book contradicts such simplification. Reading about how Austen set about writing and publishing her novels is delightful. Austen’s witty letters take center stage. Buy it here.

‘Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith’ by JD Vance

“For its first 177 pages, JD Vance’s new book is a thoughtful read,” said Molly Olmstead in Slate. It begins roughly where Hillbilly Elegy, his breakthrough 2016 memoir, left off: with the 2005 death of the grandmother he called Mamaw. Vance, raised in the Pentecostal-evangelical tradition, had by then become, in his words, “an angry atheist.” In Communion, our vice president depicts his journey to converting to Catholicism in 2019 with real care. Then the account reaches the start of his political career, and “what happened here is clear”: He wrote that first part of this book before he decided in 2021 to run for a U.S. Senate seat. Vance suddenly begins trashing straw-men foes and weakly defending his flip-flop on Donald Trump, and it’s depressing because, until then, “you might have forgotten you were reading a book from the same Vance who supported Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown in Minneapolis.”

He talks early on about the importance of being humble in the face of life’s complexity, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. But by the book’s second half, “he has cast humility aside,” suggesting, among other things, that the government should do more to make businesses fairer and kinder. At one point, he falsely accuses a conservative policy analyst of prioritizing corporate profits over family, and his “egregious” misreading of her argument “typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes.” His arrogance is such a feature of the thinking, said Alexandra Petri in The Atlantic, that his new book reads like an account of “how he finally decided that Catholicism met his exacting standards.” He has famously counseled the pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” and here he complains that Pope Leo XIV’s emissaries weren’t specific enough when they directly shared concerns with him about the Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of migrants. “What did they take issue with, exactly?” he writes.

Still, Vance’s book “offers a telling look into the movement he may try to reform,” said Christian Paz in Vox. “I found his faith journey moving,” and it tracks with that of many young men who, after becoming disillusioned by secular culture, find meaning in the millennia-old teachings and rituals of the Catholic Church. So far, though, he can’t square the cruel politics of the president he serves with the church’s teachings about how to turn faith into good works. Communion reads to me like a book by a man “who has a deeply anxious personality, carries serious real scars from his childhood, and doesn’t really know who he is even now,” said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. Having found some answers in Catholicism, “he seems upset that he can’t find a way to map that onto the world.”

‘The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity From the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris’ by Andrea Wulf

“George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Fortunately, Andrea Wulf’s new book “thrillingly” resurrects the 18th-century polymath’s life story, recounting how he became famous by his early 20s as a traveler, scientist, and author who was ahead of his time in speaking out against racism and sexism. Born in 1754 in a Prussian village that’s now part of Poland, Forster was 10 when he began traveling with his father, a pastor and naturalist. By 17, young George was living in England and fluent in several languages when he joined Capt. James Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas. He shared his vivid observations in a remarkable 1777 book, and however forgotten he is today, “it is invigorating to read him observing, thinking, and enthusing on the page.”

Likewise, “it is unusual to devote almost half a biography to only three years of a subject’s life,” said Nick Bartlett in The Guardian. But that’s how crucial the Cook voyage was in shaping Forster’s unusual sociopolitical views. He was instantly appalled by how his fellow Europeans treated the Indigenous peoples they encountered, devoting his time to getting to know the targets of the bias. Transformed, Forster wrote about his findings in 1777’s A Voyage Round the World and for the remainder of his life railed in his writings against the racism he detected in the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wulf came to know Forster’s mind so deeply that we follow his adventures “as if perched on his shoulder.”

“Forster was, on Wulf’s ample evidence, good to the core,” said John Banville in The Wall Street Journal. Life, though, was less kind in return. His father, who inspired his intellectual curiosity, was an irascible man who took more from George than he gave. Forster’s friends cuckolded him and his wife disdained him. Late in life, “Forster’s good sense deserted him,” as his enthusiasm for the French Revolution inspired him to openly back the Reign of Terror. He’d die in Paris of an illness at just 39. Still, “how many men of twice his age have lived a life so marvelous and rewarding?”

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Summer is a sleepy season for new cookbooks. Publishers are stacking the deck for the fall, when a glut of books are sent into the world steeled for holiday gifting. But the publishing machine never quite halts, and the coming months do star a (smaller) collection of exciting new releases.

‘Cooking from Scratch: A Careful Selection of Useful Recipes’ by Toya Boudy

New Orleans is forever a keystone of African American culture. Boudy, a native New Orleanian, draws the thread from the Black past to the Black present, using the first known cookbook published by a Black woman, Malinda Russell’s 1866 text, “A Domestic Cook Book,” as a model. The subtitle of “Cooking from Scratch” is “A Careful Selection of Useful Recipes.” Practicality and lineage, with recipes that capture south Louisiana, like mini crawfish pies, and those that honor the homeland, like African spinach stew, anchor Boudy’s story in the now and the omnipresent before. (out now, $33, Countryman Press, Amazon)

‘Great Bakes from the Midwest: Modern Classic Recipes from the Midwest’ by Martin Sorge

The debut cookbook from Sorge, the winner of “The Great American Baking Show” in 2023, sprints across a variety of baking topics. It is a fitting approach, considering the show’s versatility demands. Chapters on cookies, bread and cobblers and their kin cover all the baking essentials.

There is often a Midwestern bent to Sorge’s recipes, proper for someone whose home base is Chicago. Focaccia bursts with the flavors of a Chicago hot dog. A Michigan Forest Cake employs the state’s famed sour cherries. Homey and precise, the book will prime you for baking success.(Aug. 4, $38, Agate, Amazon)

‘Coffee Shop at Home: The Ultimate Guide to Making Your Favorite Coffee Drinks’ by Katerina Diaz

You’ve heard the gripe: Millennials spend all their money on fancy coffee drinks. The bromide has been debunked, but there is power — and delight — in making coffee shop drinks at home. Diaz shows you how, by walking almost-caffeinated readers through how to shop for beans, buy equipment and brew. Plus, there are recipes for the syrups and techniques you crave, including Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espresso and Honey Lavender Latte. Yes, even pumpkin spice appears, in the form of Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew. (Aug. 11, $25, Clarkson Potter, Amazon)

‘Cooking Thai: Heritage and Modern Recipes from My Kitchen Notebooks’ by Pim Techamuanvivit and Andrea Nguyen

Plenty of chefs have Michelin-starred restaurants across different continents. Less common is a female chef doing so. All the more rare is a Thai American woman juggling that kind of constellation. Techamuanvivit, the Bangkok-born chef of San Francisco’s one-starred Kin Khao and Nari and Bangkok’s one-star Nahm, gets to the bones of Thai food. There are family recipes, alongside modern interpretations of Thai food.

A personal tale that also looks at one of the world’s great cuisines from a bird’s eye view, “Cooking Thai” might overturn your ideas of Thai food. Essential bonus: Techamuanvivit’s co-author, Andrea Nguyen, is one of the States’ premier cookbook authors, a guarantee that this book’s recipes will be clear-eyed and executable. (Aug. 25, $40, Ten Speed Press, Amazon)

‘Foods of La Frontera: Recipes and New Taste Frontiers from Both Sides of the Border’ by Pati Jinich

Jinich is like an ambulatory Benetton ad. She deftly flits between the U.S. and Mexico, aiming to not solely showcase recipes from both sides but to reveal the humanity behind those dishes. In her latest book, the Mexico City-born, Washington, D.C.-based author and television personality wanders the borderlands of the two countries.

Tamales are loaded with bean, chile and cheese. Chocolate deepens tres leches cake. Nachos receive the starry treatment they warrant. Whether you want to cook ideal versions of dishes you already know and love or crave to better understand the exceptional liminality of La Frontera, Jinich’s newest treatise is ready to assist. (Sept. 15, $35, HarperCollins, Amazon)

“It’s well known that pregnancy and childbirth affect women’s brains and hormones,” said Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times: so profound is the impact of “baby brain” that “a computer can tell a mother from a non-mother just by looking at a scan”.

How parenthood affects men is less well understood; but in her new book, Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, “fills an important gap in our understanding”.

Saxbe herself carried out one of the world’s only studies into how men’s brains are altered by having a child, and it revealed that men undergo many of the same changes as women, “though not quite as dramatically”.

In men, the “volume of grey matter shrinks”, enabling a “temporary tuning-up of the parts of the cortex that connect us to others’ emotions”. New fathers also suffer a drop in testosterone, which facilitates bonding with their infant, as well as making a “dad bod” likely.

Combining academic data with “stories about the men in her own life”, Saxbe’s book is a “refreshing” call to “bust the stereotypes of fathers as clueless or uncaring”.

Kierkegaard described becoming a father as a transition from the “aesthetic stage, which is mainly about yourself, to the ethical stage, which is mainly about other people”, said Thomas W. Hodgkinson in Literary Review. “Dad Brain” engagingly explores how such a “massive life change” manifests itself physically. The fact that it is about such an under-investigated area is both its “USP” and a weakness: Saxbe’s account of the “science of fatherhood” inevitably ends up feeling frustratingly patchy. New fathers lose 1% of their brain matter. Is that a lot to lose or a little? I’m still not clear. Still, “anyone due to become a dad” could do a lot worse than this accessible, “nicely done primer”.

Buy “Dad Brain” for £19.99 from The Week Bookshop

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Tom Coyne is the author of several acclaimed books about golf, including A Gentleman’s Game, Paper Tiger, and his latest, A Course Called Home, about his adventures as the owner of a run-down nine-hole course. Below, he names the books for which he’s most grateful.

‘Where I’m Calling From’ by Raymond Carver (1988)

I am certainly not the only MFA grad who has Raymond Carver to thank (or blame) for pursuing short-story writing as a vocation. When this collection landed in my hands, I was not only taken by the stories but also inspired to try my hand at this thing he made look so easy. These are stories I return to when I worry that I need to be writing about vampires or dragons. Buy it here.

‘This Boy’s Life’ by Tobias Wolff (1989)

Memoir gets a bad rap as indulgent and self-absorbed stuff, but this book was a lesson in memoir as entertainment and storytelling. And it would influence my next five books, steering me away from the therapeutic confessional that tempts the nonfiction writer. Buy it here.

‘On Writing’ by Stephen King (2000)

I used to not read a lot of Stephen King, and a writer reading another writer’s take on writing felt like a circular chore. But the book turned out to be life-changing stuff. The man knows literature and craft in a way that his popular fiction belies, and it’s a surprising page-turner. Buy it here.

‘My Ántonia’ by Willa Cather (1918)

If you want to write books, you have to love them, unreasonably so, and I remember falling hard for My Ántonia. Everything about it—the place, the heart, the strength. I was a high schooler who found a book I wanted everybody to read, and I told everyone who would listen that I had the book for them. Buy it here.

‘To the Linksland’ by Michael Bamberger (1992)

I went to grad school to write the Great American Novel. Instead, I wrote a book about caddies. When I found myself accidentally landing in the golf-writing genre, I wasn’t sure if I had sold out my ambitions. Bamberger’s book assuaged such fears and helped me embrace golf as a subject worthy of literary treatment. Buy it here.

‘Sailing Alone Around the Room’ by Billy Collins (2001)

Insert any of Billy Collins’ collections here. Before I sit down to write, I read a few of his poems—“Snow Day” is a favorite—to recall what great sentences sound like, and to recall that one right word trumps a thousand ambitious ones. Buy it here.

‘World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments’ by Simon Kuper

“It would be a mistake to think of World Cup Fever as a simple sports book,” said Dan Friedman in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Simon Kuper, a sportswriter for the Financial Times, has attended every World Cup tournament since 1990, and he’s “uniquely qualified” to tell each of the several stories his latest work weaves together. Besides being a memoir, a portrait of the passions soccer inspires, and an account of how the World Cup and the game itself have evolved since the inaugural 1930 tournament, “it is, in effect, a snapshot of how history has dashed the hopes of the post–Cold War generations.” FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup, once was led by men who dreamed that sport could help create a more just and democratic world. But power eventually shifted to the “venal creeps” who’ve run the show for three decades. Indeed, after reading Kuper’s “complex and loving” indictment of the sport, “I felt physically sick.”

Kuper, “one of the best sportswriters in the English language today,” doesn’t overromanticize the World Cup’s past, said Ian Buruma in The New Yorker. Jules Rimet, the idealist who presided over FIFA from 1921 until 1954, agreed to let Mussolini’s Italy hold the 1934 event, establishing that any nation can win FIFA’s blessing if it’s willing to pay the costs of hosting. Rimet’s successors kowtowed to murderous dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, while the most recent Cups have unfolded in Putin’s Russia in 2018 and in Qatar, an authoritarian sheikdom. FIFA was always corrupt. In Kuper’s “highly engaging” book, we learn how it’s become more corrupt than ever, but we also get much more. The Ugandan-born, Dutch-raised French resident writes “superbly” about the skills of different players and national teams, and he’s just as good at observing the cultural differences between host cities and each team’s fan following.

“Each tournament Kuper has covered marked a shift in the geopolitical weather,” said Andre Pagliarini in The New Republic. When Italy hosted in 1990, hopes were high because the Cold War had entered a twilight phase. In 2018, Russia paused to host between its invasions of Ukraine. And Kuper also provides revealing portraits of 2002 East Asia, 2010 South Africa, and 2014 Brazil. “World Cups don’t change the world,” he writes, “but they do illuminate it.” He proves that over and over again, providing “a testament to the benefits of committing oneself to a subject for a long time.” As viewers around the globe watch the World Cup unfolding, “they see virtuosity, emotion, and the hand of fate at work on the grandest stage in sports.” Because the event is a mirror, “they also glimpse the world as it is.”

‘Trash! A Garbageman’s Story’ by Simon Paré-Poupart

“It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Written by Simon Paré-Poupart, a veteran Montreal garbageman now in his 40s, this “slim, raffish, and spirited” book “raises the blinds on his industry,” revealing the job’s taxing demands, the coarse language and renegade attitudes of its practitioners, and the dark humor that keeps them sane. “Paré-Poupart is in love with almost all of it,” including the sense that being on society’s bottom rung makes him tougher, freer, and less prone to self deception. “Trash! has been compared to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant kitchen exposé. Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate.”

“It quickly becomes apparent how vital Paré-Poupart and his colleagues are to the functioning of polite society,” said Ceci Browning in The Times (U.K.). The mostly male cohort is packed with colorful characters. A collector nicknamed Spandex often works while wearing nothing but bike shorts and flip-flops. Another vomits each day on the first block of the run, then just does the work. Many others work drunk or high, even though a run can require lift ing heavy loads for 15 hustling miles. Paré-Poupart likens the typical garbageman to Sisyphus, fated to clean up for society day after day eternally. Despite his writing’s political thrust, it’s “suffused with literary oomph and good humor,” and “I zoomed through Trash! in a couple of hours.”

“Paré-Poupart elegantly makes the case that we should all think more about the people who collect our trash,” said Amanda Perry in the Literary Review of Canada. He’s an unusual example: He has earned advanced degrees in sociology and international business since he started his career in garbage, and his memoir “mixes in blue collar curse words with references to labor history and Émile Zola.” Politically, Trash! is uneven, “offering points of critique but no coherent program of reform,” including for the way recycling programs mostly just enable the steady increase of plastics pollution. The author leaves us, though, with a provocative thought experiment: What if we compensated and glorified professions accord ing to their social necessity?

When a coalition of “clerics, leftists, students, nationalists and secular intellectuals” launched the Iranian Revolution in 1979, they were united less by a shared vision than “a shared rejection” of the Shah’s rule, said Reza Aslan in The New York Times. And as Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati observe in “Stolen Revolution”, “egalitarian ideals and immense hopes” were snuffed out as “the religious regime hunted, expelled and jailed its former allies”.

That is the story of this “quietly devastating” book, which charts Iran’s transformation over the past half century into a “mafia state”. The authors tell it through the lives of six Iranians, including a revolutionary ideologue, a tech entrepreneur, and two women at the forefront of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

“The result is one of the most perceptive books on modern Iran in years, capturing not only the machinery of repression, but the fragile forms of hope that survive beneath it.”

Once in power, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, swiftly “abandoned his revolutionary promises”, said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. All talk of prosperity ended (our saints “gave up their lives for Islam, not for economics”, he intoned). Conservative dress codes were enforced, and a new military police force – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – was entrusted with preserving the revolution.

While the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) marked a more liberal, “reformist era”, the hardliners regained control when he left office and have ruled the country ever since.

“Stolen Revolution” is both an “unwavering account of the regime’s absurdities” and a “meticulously researched primer on modern Iran”.

Parts of it will “move some readers to tears”, said Justin Marozzi in The Times. The authors describe the fates of Kosar Eftekhari and Rozhin Yousefzadeh, who joined the “protests that erupted after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini”, a young woman arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. “Eftekhari had her right eye shot out by a smirking plain-clothes officer”; Yousefzadeh was thrown into the “filthy and dangerous Qarchak women’s prison”.

It was ostensibly in the hope of ending such tyranny that the US and Israel launched their war against the regime. This “blistering” book suggests that, on the contrary, the conflict will only entrench its most hardline elements further – and that it will prove to be “yet another US blunder in the Middle East, [and] one that will cost Iranians, and the rest of us, dearly”.

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James Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man, reckons with the Alex Murdaugh murder case, which the poet, novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer covered for The New Yorker. Below, Lasdun names six great books about terrible happenings.

‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (2014)

Garner’s life-affirming novels are rightly loved, but I have a special regard for her nonfiction account of the case of Robert Farquharson, who murdered his three young sons. Probing, self-searching, drily astute, it’s an extraordinary reckoning with the dark forces that erupt into ordinary lives. Buy it here.

‘Nada’ by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)

Manchette drew on pulp and noir to create vehicles for grappling with serious societal issues. The result was a set of riveting political thrillers. Nada, about a group of 1970s radical leftists who plot to kidnap a U.S. ambassador, is his cynical but mind-blowing masterpiece. Buy it here.

‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ by Janet Malcolm (1990)

In a sense, all of Janet Malcolm’s books are crime stories—needle-sharp forensic examinations of human folly—whether she’s writing about poets or psychologists or actual criminals. This one, a study of the treacherous relationship between a killer and the journalist he took into his confidence, is my favorite. Buy it here.

‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ by George V. Higgins (1970)

If this is the hardest of hard-boiled crime stories, it’s also one of the most unexpectedly moving. Higgins had a Dickensian eye and ear for the world he made his own—Boston’s seedy criminal underworld—and its denizens become tragic figures in his hands, none more so than the aging gun dealer Eddie Coyle. Buy it here.

‘The Vanishing’ by Tim Krabbé (1984)

I’m not a fan of horror, but this take on a venerable horror trope (I won’t give it away) rises to a Dostoyevskian philosophical brilliance as it entraps its two young innocents in the logic of pure evil. It was made into a very good Dutch film by George Sluizer (who remade it into a bad Hollywood film), but it is the short, utterly unsparing book that has always haunted me. Buy it here.

‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871–72)

The great novels of the master himself tower over just about everything else. I’m inclined to think that this tumultuous passion play, about idealists warped into murderous criminals by their own ideals, is the greatest of them all. Buy it here.

‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett

“Is there a place in serious literature for kind, happy characters and kind, happy stories?” asked Helen Schulman in The New York Times. Ann Patchett’s “intimate and entertaining” 10th novel “makes the strong case that there is.” The tale begins in high suspense, with 53-year-old Daphne and her husband, Jonathan, seemingly being stalked while visiting New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the stranger trailing them turns out to be Eddie, Daphne’s beloved former stepfather. She hasn’t seen him in over 40 years, and their chance reencounter brings her to tears. As the two reconnect over weeks, then months, fans of Patchett’s past novels will “wait in vain for the terror of Bel Canto or the thrills of State of Wonder,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. Instead, Whistler is “that loveliest of summer gifts, a story of reconciliation, of old affections renewed, of a family’s circumference enlarged.”

A novel both “radiantly intelligent” and “emotionally wrenching, Whistler is “the exquisite production of an author working at the height of her powers,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. Patchett’s masterfully constructed story intertwines two timelines. In the present, Eddie, a book editor, charms everyone in Daphne’s circle, including her mom, who divorced him decades earlier. The other story thread reveals the cause of the family split: a car crash in which Eddie was in the driver’s seat and both he and 9-year-old Daphne were nearly killed. The two storylines are “intertwined in a way that builds tension, deepens character, and allows for unexpected discoveries,” including why the novel is named Whistler. And even when the characters grapple with heavy subjects, “Patchett’s touch is light, her humor delightful, her empathy generous and vibrant.” Without a doubt, the book is “a magnificent achievement” and “I think it’s her best novel yet.

To me, Whistler is “top-shelf comfort food, the literary equivalent of pricey ice cream,” said Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. Although “we almost care about these vanilla-bean people,” and almost care about their floral arrangements and champagne brunches, it’s “all so neat” and so untouched by lingering sorrows that it “often reads like a gratitude journal.” But there’s “a sly wit and sagacity” to Patchett’s writing that here has been “honed to perfection,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. As it explores family trauma and life’s transitory nature, Whistler proves “sweet but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love,” and it’s clear that some of its heft owes to Patchett drawing on events from her own life. “I don’t recommend consuming Whistler in one enormous gulp. I dipped in and out, savoring scenes, reflecting on them, occasionally shedding a tear. In other words, I didn’t want it to end.”

‘View From the East Wing: A Memoir’ by Jill Biden

Jill Biden’s best-selling new memoir repeats a very self-serving story, said Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal. Displaying a “mulish unwillingness” to face up to the evidence of her husband’s cognitive decline in 2024, she blames “Democratic elites” for robbing him of the shot he deserved to bounce back from his disastrous June 2024 debate performance and win a second presidential term. She admits he was so off that night that she worried he’d been drugged or was having a stroke. She even reports that she agreed when he afterward whispered to her, “I really f---ed up, didn’t I?” But she insists he remained fully capable of governing, campaigning, and beating a foe she detests, and the result is “a memoir that is at turns delusional, sappy, resentful, and—in a weirdly irresistible way—revelatory of the former first lady’s agitated state of mind.”

“The most charitable interpretation of Jill Biden’s book, particularly the parts dealing with her husband’s aging,” said Jake Tapper in CNN.com, “is that she’s having difficulty accepting what’s been happening to him for years.” Joe’s mental acuity, already visibly declining in 2024, has probably worsened. But she insists that he showed no signs of impairment that summer and that she’d have raised red flags if he had. Those claims are “very difficult to believe, if not just downright false.” And she can argue all she wants that Joe, at any age, would be a better president than our current leader. “But the choice wasn’t Trump vs. Biden. It was Trump vs. which Democrat would be best.”

“View From the East Wing says almost nothing of consequence,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Besides filling you in on, say, how many soups were served at a particular state dinner, “it follows all the regular hits for a former first lady’s memoir, reminding you that she’s a good mother and a faithful wife and a dedicated teacher.” But all of its talk about how she and Joe are good people who were doing their best reads like one of those Instagram posts you see from an acquaintance randomly reporting that she and her husband have weathered some storms but are still going strong. “It’s a woman defending her husband to an audience who didn’t ask.”

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In Katherine Center’s new novel, The Shippers, a woman attending her sister’s cruise-ship wedding ropes her childhood bestie into being her wingman. Below, the best-selling author of The Bodyguard and Happiness for Beginners names six favorite books about love.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

This is my all-time favorite Jane Austen novel—and hands-down favorite literary love story. The romantic angst and the longing that Anne Elliott feels as the man she rejected, Captain Wentworth, shows back up in her life, still angry—it’s a feast of love agony. Totally page-turning! Buy it here.

‘Just Like Heaven’ by Julia Quinn (2011)

This is a perfect ride of a historical romance about two old friends who wind up falling madly for each other after he gets sick and she arrives at his estate to nurse him back to health. The anticipation, the stakes, the slow build—it’s all exquisitely, perfectly done. Buy it here.

‘Beach Read’ by Emily Henry (2020)

Emily Henry is one of the all-time greats, and this contemporary romance is my favorite of hers. Two writers—one a writer of literary fiction, the other a romance writer—wind up summering next door to each other as they work on their novels. The sparring between them is unbeatable. Buy it here.

‘Love in the Afternoon’ by Lisa Kleypas (2010)

The first time I read this historical romance, it made me cry. The longing that our quirky but lovable heroine feels for a man who doesn’t know who she is and doesn’t know that he loves her—it’s palpable. The heart of this story is about being seen and loved for exactly who you are. Buy it here.

‘Why We Love’ by Helen Fisher (2004)

This book by behavioral researcher Helen Fisher changed my understanding of the role of love in human life. Fisher studied subjects’ brains as they looked at photos of their beloveds in scanners, and she argues that romantic love isn’t some made-up cultural thing but instead a fundamental human drive. Buy it here.

‘Love 2.0’ by Barbara Fredrickson (2013)

This utterly compelling nonfiction read redefines love, transforming it from something enormous and monolithic into micro moments of experiencing “positivity resonance”: the kinds of connections that happen between people all the time, even strangers. It’s a whole new way to think about love. Buy it here.

‘Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography’ by Joshua Kendall

The new Garry Trudeau biography is, compared with the comic strip he’s known for, “not as sophisticated, in tone and content,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. But while it’s merely “a meat-and-potatoes biography,” it “has a good story to tell,” and “I devoured it in two or three sittings, as if it were an ideal bag of popcorn.” Trudeau, now 77, is a hero to many because, beginning with the first syndicated appearance of Doonesbury in 1970, he “dragged a knowing hippie sensibility onto the playground of the comics pages.” For decades, his strips were “a daily confirmation of one’s sanity,” and he’s been just as sharp since slowing in 2014 to a Sunday-only publication schedule. He is, as this book reveals, a short guy who shot up at age 17 but who “never forgot what being a short guy was like.”

Author Joshua Kendall traces Trudeau’s life back to its origins — “a childhood marked by both immense privilege and a quiet, defining trauma,” said David Smith in The Guardian. Trudeau grew up in an upstate New York town essentially built by his great-grandfather, but his mother left the family when Garry was 10, and he battled depression and towering bullies when he was sent away to prep school. But an inspiring teacher helped him express himself through art, and after he entered Yale in 1966, he started a comic strip in the student paper that evolved into Doonesbury. By the mid-1970s, he’d won a Pulitzer Prize and was carried in newspapers with a total readership of 60 million, and he’d graduated from lampooning jocks and preppies to calling out Richard Nixon’s criminality. In 1980, he married Today show co-host Jane Pauley.

“Kendall reminds us of the many times that Doonesbury was more than just a comic strip,” said Alex Beam in The Boston Globe. A moving chapter details Trudeau’s deep immersion in the experiences of wounded combat veterans, a group he honored when one of the strip’s original characters, the footballer B.D., lost a leg fighting in the Iraq War. At other times, Trudeau has drawn anger or censorship, as when he created the funny pages’ first openly gay character or spoofed new state limits on abortions. Though Kendall persuaded the famously reclusive Trudeau to answer some biographical questions, the author offers little insight about his subject’s emotional life, leaving “a yawning hole” in his account. Still, the book is “a warm and fuzzy romp for Baby Boomers” and “a perfect biography for Trudeau: respectful, informative, and none too intrusive — just the way he would want it.”

‘Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto’ by MJ Corey

In the preface of her new book, MJ Corey offers a note of apology for pouring so much energy into analyzing a family that’s famously famous for being famous, and for little else, said Megan Garber in The Atlantic. “The rest of Corey’s book, however, is unapologetic, and rightfully so: The Kardashians matter, Corey suggests, because of who they are but also because of who we are.” It’s the viewing habits of the rest of us, after all, that have turned sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, Kendall, and Kylie—plus mother Kris—into ubiquitous and persistently influential presences in 21st-century culture. The Kardashians have become billionaires on the fuel of our attention, and Corey, who for years has been applying scholarly analysis to the family in her popular Kardashian Kolloquium social media posts, has written a book that “reads less as a biography of one clan than as a study of the culture that elevated it.”

To argue its points, the book “deploys a litany of canonical media theorists and philosophers,” said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan are invoked to show how the Kardashians shrewdly used media formats both old and new to build an enduring following. Kim, now 45, has been particularly adept at amassing attention, building her fame off the 2007 leak of a sex tape to become a billionaire entrepreneur whose image still fills social media feeds. “Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their audience.” Alas, Dekonstructing the Kardashians can be “a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative.”

Yes, the book jumps around, said Molly B. Nash in the Chicago Review of Books, but “it is an organized chaos, one that reflects the progression of this multifaceted matriarchal family into the heart of the cultural zeitgeist.” Corey’s “incredibly ambitious” study takes in all the ways the Kardashians have harvested attention, all the ways they’ve infiltrated various consumer spheres, and all the ways our responses to their evolving act reveal shifts in our relationship to mass media. “Whether we’ve wanted to or not, we’ve been keeping up.”

Have bread; breadcrumbs are inevitable. You would think then, with boundless English-speaking cultures using bread, there would be endless words for breadcrumbs. Terms that are mere descriptors for the bread pieces, like “fine,” “medium” and “large.” Would that we have 50 words to express a range of kinds of breadcrumbs, in the way Tamil has more than four dozen words for love.

In “All That Crumbs Allow,” authors Michelle Marek and Camilla Wynne creep toward that goal. Across 45 recipes — each its own kind of breadcrumb-naming treatise — the duo proclaims how versatile the kitchen staple both is and can be.

A prayer to pulverization

There is much bread-on-bread action in this text. Marek and Wynne, who both have backgrounds in pastry, cannot help themselves. Wynne, in a recipe for bread and jam twice-baked croissants, eschews the nut filling and crafts a breadcrumb frangipane, which is then slathered on bisected day-old croissants along with the jam of your choosing and baked until crackly.

Marek reminisces about the sweet cheese dumplings of her childhood visits to the Czech Republic. Soft bread cubes are beaten with butter, sugar, flour, egg and farmers cheese before a poaching turn in sweetened boiling water. The pillowy dumplings are then added to hot crisped breadcrumbs and served with roasted or fresh fruit.

Other recipes for sweets include such zingers as breadcrumb-glazed doughnuts, rhubarb cardamom breadcrumb cake and witches’ froth, a fluffy cloud of whipped apple served with clattering toasted breadcrumbs.

Savory-heads, fret not: Marek and Wynne have not abandoned you. A three-page blueprint for schnitzel ensures the finest you might ever cook. Roasted potatoes are shellacked with buttery crumbs. From the annals of cooking past, sauce jouvert, spunky with marjoram, red wine vinegar, both walnuts and hazelnuts, and breadcrumbs, is raised from the annals of recipe history to be draped over pretty much any kind of vegetable.

In the beginning, there was bread

The book’s centerpiece chapters on starters, mains and sweets are bookended on one side by a treatise on how to make and store breadcrumbs of various sizes, with an under-duress sub-section about how to buy breadcrumbs. “There is, it must be said, something perverse about paying for breadcrumbs,” Marek and Wynne write. “Buying breadcrumbs is one of life’s cosmic jokes, and it makes us laugh every time.”

A pantry chapter closes “All That Crumbs Allow.” It is a terse collection of six recipes that swerves from the book’s much-used, dead-simple Crunchy Topping to Fairy Rocks, with their sparkling blend of freeze-dried raspberries, sesame seeds, ground rose petals, sugar and, yes, breadcrumbs.

The book’s coda is a collection of exciting recipes from pals. In Marek and Wynne’s world, breadcrumbs are not for gatekeeping. They are meant to be spread wide and far. You can almost hear the authors chattering, “May you forever follow a trail of gluten nubbins to immeasurable deliciousness.”

The Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist picks her favourite books. Her own book, “The Fear Opportunity: How Feeling your Fear Builds Strength and Confidence”, is available for purchase.

Invisible Women

Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019

This book explores the under-representation of women in the way the world is designed. It is tragically enlightening about the gender bias in everyday life.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

Charlie Mackesy, 2019

I love this beautifully illustrated book in so many ways; it’s comforting and reassuring and filled with the kind of phrases that should be ingrained in your soul for all the hard moments in life. I wish I had read it as a child.

The Chimp Paradox

Steve Peters, 2012

I lovingly call Steve Peters “Uncle Peters”, because I worked with him on the Olympic team and he had such a huge influence on my life. This book helped me understand my behaviour better and allowed me to access my fullest potential. I would not have won gold without Steve.

Circe

Madeline Miller, 2018

I’m obsessed with mythology and I loved this reimagining of the sorceress from “The Odyssey”. I find it intriguing the way that Miller looks at ancient myths from the point of view of the characters. I couldn’t put it down.

Milk and Honey

Rupi Kaur, 2014

This poetry collection made me go, “Wow!” I’d never come across anything like it, and I found it very reassuring because it reflects the struggles and anxieties of the female experience in a way that is very relatable. It doesn’t pull any punches.

Dancing with Elephants

Jarem Sawatsky, 2017

In Western society we’re not very good at navigating death, and this book helped me through the loss of my brother and father. Sawatsky describes his journey through terminal illness and shows us how to celebrate the experience, rather than mourning the person it’s happening to. Beautiful.