Barbara Cartland, like most successful writers, was a creature of routine. Every day, between 1.15pm and 4pm, she would recline on a chaise longue, “clad in brilliant pink, hair a platinum helmet”, and dictate around 7,000 words to a secretary while “fondling a Pekingese”, said Wendy Holden in Literary Review.

By these means, she churned out roughly 20 novels a year – more than 700 over the course of her lifetime – and sold 750 million copies, a figure “exceeded only by Shakespeare and Agatha Christie”.

While her “tales of virgins and sheikhs, pirates and princesses” were devoured across the world, they proved especially durable in the Middle East: “Arab men,” she noted, “can’t get enough of the sort of girl I write about.”

It would be easy simply to mock Cartland, but the journalist and broadcaster Matthew Sweet avoids this trap in “The Great Dictator”. Without skipping over her faults, he “gives her virtues full credit” and treats her as a figure of “cultural and historical importance”. The result is a “fantastically enjoyable, drily hilarious and incredibly well-researched biography”.

Cartland may have had a “marshmallowy exterior”, but Sweet shows in this “brilliant book” that behind it “lurked sinews of high-tensile steel”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian.

Coming of age just after the First World War, at a time when there “were not enough husbands to go around”, she resolved to be “financially self-sufficient”.

She spent the 1920s working as a gossip columnist, reporting on the escapades of the Bright Young Things, before making a “tactical marriage to a dull man called Alexander McCorquodale”, who proved to be an alcoholic. Divorcing him after having a daughter, Raine (the future Countess Spencer, stepmother to Diana, Princess of Wales), she “effected a neat swap” by marrying his paternal cousin, which meant she didn’t even need to change her surname. In 1950, the pair settled in Camfield Place, a manor house in Hertfordshire, where she lived until her death in 2000, aged 98.

“Sweet writes with great wit and brio but also considerable sympathy,” said Lynn Barber in The Observer. He points out that Cartland was a “great organiser”. While clothes were rationed during the Second World War, she set up a scheme to lend wedding dresses to Auxiliary Territorial Service brides. Later, she led a campaign to create a reservation for Gypsies near Camfield Place: “Barbaraville” opened in 1963 and “remains to this day”. It is, Sweet suggests, “perhaps her most lasting achievement”.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the prolific chef and restaurateur in New York City, operates more than 45 restaurants around the world and has written five cookbooks. All of his books capture the remarkable way he merges simplicity and elucidative flavor combinations. His fourth book, 2011’s “Home Cooking with Jean-Georges ($40),” does so in a particularly utilitarian fashion.

Cooking with eyes wide open

Vongerichten’s five-ingredient watermelon salad, for example, is a ferocious overturning of how to think about a favorite fruit. The rich funk of the blue cheese and resonant twang of freshly ground black pepper convince the watermelon to let its sweetness glow. The fruit’s juicy core tangoes with extra-virgin olive oil’s grassy unctuousness. Pop, pop goes a dusting of flaky salt.

In the recipe’s intro, Vongerichten offhandedly notes the salad “tastes even better when the watermelon is cold and the cheese is room temperature and soft.” Texture steps into the spotlight and turns a sublime recipe all the grander. Vongerichten tosses this intel at the reader as an aside. He cannot help himself. Wisdom plops out of him like ice in a sleet storm.

Such is how “Home Cooking with Jean-Georges” flows. This is a book in which the tricks, takeaways and techniques are embedded in the recipes themselves. Parmesan chicken teaches you that breadcrumbs are extraneous when you grate Parmesan on both large and small holes on a grater, coat chicken breasts with it, bake, and, whammo, savory, textural contrast without the filler.

You might in no other cookbook see someone add a stick and a half of butter to boiling water to cook mustard greens. Then you eat those greens, all silky, their jagged acerbity mellowed after four minutes of boiling, and you shake your head in confounded appreciation.

Famous chef, best-in-class writer

A chef creating a cookbook is only as reliable as their writer. For “Home Cooking,” Vongerichten enlisted one of the finest recipe writer-developers in the game, Genevieve Ko, who is currently an editor at The New York Times.

Ko ensured the recipe’s instructions in this book were as pristine and legible as Vongerichten’s cooking is nimble and gleaming. A watermelon salad can say so much and teach so readily if its quiddities are conveyed with precision. Effortlessness has perhaps never been presented with such rigor.

“What a challenge”, said Liz Else in New Scientist. Penning the “first major biography” of Stephen Hawking with the theoretical physicist’s estate and the “whole scientific world” all “watching closely to see the result”. But science writer Graham Farmelo has pulled it off. “Kudos all round.”

Farmelo paints a “comprehensive and accessible portrait” of Hawking as an “extraordinarily determined man” who had a darker side to which the public and scientific community “mostly turned a blind eye”, said Philip Ball in The Guardian.

The “uncomfortable but unavoidable truth” is that Hawking’s refusal to give scientific credit to others, sexism and “controlling behaviour” were largely “ignored because of his disability”. “I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that.”

Farmelo first covers the science which offers a “genuinely inspirational tale”. Hawking’s work on black-hole thermodynamics would have been “impressive by any measure”. But achieving it while living with “debilitating and ultimately paralysing” motor neurone disease is remarkable.

The “problematic stuff” emerges from “those closest to him”. His friends at Oxford found him “lazy and entitled”; his youngest son said his father never let him win at board games as a child; and his “unsparing ridicule” of the religious beliefs of his first wife, Jane, contributed to the unravelling of their marriage. We also learn how “scandalously bad” he was at acknowledging the work of others, something that became clear early on when he “failed to indicate his debt” to the physicist Roger Penrose.

This pattern of “accepting more than his fair share of credit” certainly “ruffled feathers” in the scientific community, said John Gribbin in Literary Review. But in person he was “gregarious and generous” to his students.

Farmelo gives non-scientists a “good sense” of why Hawking’s work matters, including “succinct discussions of how black holes evaporate” and the “nature of gravitational waves”. But his book also puts the facts into “context”. The result is an “absorbing and informative account of the life of the most interesting physicist of the second half of the 20th century”.

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Book releases typically pick up in the fall, and this September is no exception. Whether you are looking for something deeply educational or thrillingly entertaining, this month there are plenty of books to look forward to. New publications include a maximalist thriller set in Jamaica, another entry from horror phenom Tananarive Due, and a memoir from former ICE detainee Mahmoud Khalil.

‘Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature’ by Emily Wilson

Drawing on decades of experience as a scholar, Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer’s “Odyssey” and “Iliad,” is exploring how translation shapes our understanding of the ancient world. Her new book is a series of essays on the “challenges of translation” and the “pleasures and insights to be gained from reading the classics,” said The Guardian.

In one essay, she “probes the bawdier side of classics” and “connects the ‘lyrical flow’ of Aristophanes to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B,” said Kirkus Reviews. It is a “lively exploration of ancient literature.” (out now, $19, W.W. Norton, Amazon)

‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James

Marlon James, who previously won the Booker Prize for his 2015 novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” has also made the longlist for this year’s prize with “The Disappearers.” The novel is set in 1988, opening with a group of “eight gay men commencing rehearsals for a play” in Kingston, Jamaica, said Harper’s Bazaar.

When a “violent, homophobic mob descends on the group,” leaving one of them dead, the survivors deal with the fallout of the attack in their own ways, said Harper’s Bazaar. Going against the minimalist trend, the Jamaican writer’s new novel, at more than 600 pages, is “instead a maximalist’s banquet,” said The New York Times. It is “humane, blood-flecked, disturbing and sustaining.” (out now, $32, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Exit Party’ by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopian novel is a “futuristic, fluctuating tale of doubleness and disaster,” said LitHub. The story kicks off in California in 2031, a year “disturbingly close to our present,” where a party is thrown and the “United States government has fallen.”

It’s a story of “shifting structure and ephemeral sturdiness,” said LitHub, where meanings falter, while “glimmers of truth and resolution sparkle in the distance.” There is no one who can “write a surrealist and apocalyptic universe so firmly, and horrifyingly, rooted in reality.” (Sep. 15, $32, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Mazywood’ by Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due’s reputation as a master of the horror genre became clear after the highly acclaimed “The Reformatory.” Her follow-up, “Mazywood,” is a haunting tale of how an errant wish shaped the lives of one family from the era of Old Hollywood to today.

Due crafts “memorable and deeply human characters, good and bad alike,” and provides a “searing, incisive take on the politics of Black performance past and present,” said Publishers Weekly. Add “nail-biting chase scenes” and a “blistering final twist,” and this “heart-pounding horror story further cements Due as one of the greats.” (Sep. 22, $32, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention’ by Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil became a household name last year when ICE “apprehended him without a warrant, separated him from his pregnant wife and New York City community, and detained him under the threat of deportation,” said Harper’s Bazaar. Based on notes from his prison diary, this memoir “unflinchingly shows the cruelty of ICE detention” while also telling the story of his “family’s expulsion from Palestine and his activism in the face of Israel’s assault on Gaza.” (Sep. 29, $28, Macmillan, Amazon)

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Jennifer McMahon is the best-selling author of 12 suspense novels, including The Winter People and Promise Not to Tell. In her latest book, Stay Buried, siblings new to a remote Vermont town discover that the locals live in fear of a vengeful spirit.

‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ by Washington Irving (1820)

The story of Ichabod Crane terrified me as a kid. I remember running home on wooded paths from a friend’s house, certain I heard hoofbeats behind me. I was sure that if I turned back, I’d see a rider with his head tucked under his arm, and that just as I was making out the lights of home through the trees, he’d hurl it through the air at me. Buy it here.

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson (1948)

Until I read this masterpiece in middle school, I had no idea people wrote stories about things like this: small towns full of normal people who were capable of terrible things. It really made me think about the way groups of people can normalize brutality in the name of “tradition.” Buy it here.

‘Harvest Home’ by Thomas Tryon (1973)

This quintessential folk-horror novel taught me never to trust a seemingly idyllic setting, remote location, or tight-knit community—things that all seem so charming on first glance! Buy it here.

‘Pine’ by Francine Toon (2020)

Pine is the perfect example of a book in which the setting feels like a character. The novel’s little Scottish village, surrounded by forest, feels claustrophobic, isolated, steeped in dread. Throw in a girl with a missing mother, sightings of a mysterious woman, and a vanished teenager and you have all the ingredients of a very compelling tale. Buy it here.

‘The Ritual’ by Adam Nevill (2011)

I wouldn’t venture into the woods for a long time after reading this. Four college friends meet up for a reunion hiking trip and make an ill-advised decision to take a shortcut. When they come upon a disemboweled animal hanging from the trees, we know something truly terrifying awaits them. Buy it here.

‘Starve Acre’ by Andrew Michael Hurley (2019)

This many-layered story centers on the tragic loss of a young child. His mother is convinced some part of him is still there at the family home; his father becomes obsessed with digging up the roots of a legendary oak tree. Hurley’s writing is gorgeous, the sort that I willingly get lost in knowing all the while it’s going to take me someplace unsettling. Buy it here.

‘The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy’ by Gil Durán

“Picture this: A loosely organized cabal of obscenely wealthy tech moguls aim to overthrow democracy and replace it with a corporatist dictatorship,” said Kevin Truong in The San Francisco Standard. The premise, undoubtedly, “would make for a good political thriller.” In Gil Durán’s new nonfiction hit, it makes for more unsettling reading. Durán, a journalist who’s also been a spokesman for Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, argues that tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the main patron of JD Vance’s career, sits at the center of an active and powerful circle of tech evangelists who believe democracy is obsolete, technology will create a utopian future, and their cohort is an elite that should decide how the future unfolds. The claim would sound like mere conspiracy theory, said Tonya Mosley in NPR.org, except that the players Durán identifies “have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years.”

“You could not ask for a more hair-raising compendium of the insane things that Silicon Valley moguls have advocated for,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has touted as formative to his beliefs a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, that arguably predicted the rise of cryptocurrency and AI while also forecasting the collapse of nation-states and emergence of individuals smart and powerful enough to pursue their ambitions without constraint. Thiel can count Elon Musk and fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreessen among his allies, and all appear to have been influenced by alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates putting the U.S. under the rule of a CEO-style monarch and has talked about the need to develop “a humane alternative to genocide” to address Earth’s supposed excess of unproductive individuals. While Durán “gives perhaps too much credence to the viability of Silicon Valley’s most authoritarian dreams,” his book is a “much-needed” wake-up call, warning us that today’s tech giants should be feared, not blindly worshipped.

Durán claims that tech moguls view the Trump regime as a vehicle for the expansion of their power, and “few could dispute this,” said Steve Rose in The Guardian. Remember the many tech titans standing behind him at his 2025 inauguration? Or how they helped the Trump family make billions off cryptocurrency? The payoffs have come in government contracts such as Palantir’s estimated $13.7 billion annual haul as well as in the wrecking ball taken to government oversight. Trump has even backed such nutty ideas as building 10 “Freedom Cities” that would be exempt from many existing regulations. Thiel and his allies haven’t fully triumphed yet, though, as indicated by the recent surge in public opposition to data centers. With any luck, “this could be a radicalizing moment.”

‘The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence’ by Kimon de Greef

“Readers who are unaware that the secretions from some toads may serve as portals to the divine are in for some significant revelations,” said Dave Shiflett in The Wall Street Journal. Kimon de Greef’s engaging new book takes as a given that the Sonoran Desert toad produces 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful natural psychedelic. But de Greef is also interested in the subculture that’s arisen around “the God molecule,” as advocates call it. Toad facilitators now regularly milk the toad’s glands and dry the extract so it can be smoked, generating potent trips that are said to collapse the ego. Toad smoking can cause instant psychosis, but fans of the practice include Mike Tyson and Hunter Biden, and “de Greef describes the effects of 5-MeO-DMT in such glowing terms that a foot-washing Baptist might be tempted to give it a shot.”

“For an experience this intense, a wise guide is key—or so you’d think,” said Susannah Cahalan in The New York Times. The antihero of de Greef’s story is Octavio Rettig Hinojosa, a Mexican doctor turned psychedelic celebrity who, since 2006, has championed toad smoking, claiming the practice helped him kick crack. Since achieving widespread fame in 2013, Rettig has overseen gatherings that have introduced thousands of novices to toad smoking. “If you’re familiar with the guru playbook, you know where this is going.” Rettig’s recklessness has led to suffering. At one point, he was charged in the death of a woman who stopped breathing during one of his ceremonies.

“As de Greef is keen to stress, the problem is not just one eccentric doctor,” said Lilia Marie Ellis in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Though 5-MeO-DMT is illegal in the U.S., pharmaceutical companies are displaying similar heedlessness as they race to monetize synthesized versions, which have shown promise in the treatment of addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. De Greef’s book “stalls slightly” when it turns away from Rettig, “whose energy jumps off the page.” Still, The Ego Trip “succeeds in illustrating that commercialized psychedelics are not the miracle drug many hoped for.”

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The Mediterranean is a place, a mood, a cooking ethos. Twenty-two countries border the cherished body of water, each with its own specialized manner of feeding their people. These books are no comprehensive consideration of every kitchen in the Mediterranean. But they sure are an exhilarating starting point.

‘The Food of Morocco’ by Paula Wolfert

Wolfert’s original book on Moroccan food was published in 1973, far ahead of its time in its insistence on the proper way to cook the food of the North African country. In 2011, she published an even more deeply considered version of that landmark book. “The Food of Morocco” is “hardly the quintessential Paula Wolfert cookbook,” said LA Weekly. “This book is Paula Wolfert.”

Her influence in the intervening decades was immense. The popularity of clay pots for cooking and the ubiquity of preserved lemons in many an American kitchen are all Wolfert’s doing. With “The Food of Morocco,” tagines of all sorts, lively salads with touches of flower water, and the proper way to make couscous can become second nature in American kitchens far from the shores of Rabat and Tangier. ($60, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘The Food of Sicily’ by Fabrizia Lanza

Italy points its finger well into the Mediterranean Sea, but you could argue that the region most influenced by that body of water is the island of Sicily. Lanza runs a cooking school in Palermo, and “The Food of Sicily” (2023) sings a song many Americans know well, being that so many Italian immigrants to the U.S. were Sicilian.

But no entire cuisine travels with its migrants, so “The Food of Sicily” is loaded with surprises, too — swordfish stuffed with garlic and mint, octopus salad, and watermelon pudding included. Sicily has “always been at the crossroads of the Mediterranean,” said Lanza to Monocle magazine. “It’s a place where people have brought their own unique customs to enrich our table.” ($40, Artisan, Amazon)

‘The Glorious Foods of Greece’ by Diane Kochilas

Love your Greek salad and gyros to your heart’s oregano-laced content. There is a world of Greek food most Americans have never experienced. A “landmark for Greek cooking in the U.S.,” Kochilas' seminal 2001 book, “The Glorious Foods of Greece,” is the result of eight years of research across the country’s varied regions, from the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace in the north to Greece’s six main island groups, and “displays a deep grasp of history,” said Publishers Weekly.

The 400-odd recipes include savory pies of all stripes, a mind-boggling array of uses for many styles of cheese, and boundless vegetable dishes. Moussaka, you are adored, but Kochilas will have you seeing Greek cuisine in colors beyond blue and white. ($40, ThriftBooks, Amazon)

‘Istanbul and Beyond: Exploring the Diverse Cuisines of Turkey’ by Robyn Eckhardt

Turkey, a sprawling, varied country, in the hands of Eckhardt and the photographer David Hagerman, is a “picaresque portrait of a country that doesn’t really have a national cuisine at all; it has dozens,” said Max Falkowitz at Saveur. There are the famed Urfa chiles of the country’s southeast, the seafood, greens and corn in the north that edge the Black Sea, and the grand amalgam of influences in Istanbul.

“Istanbul and Beyond” (2017) is organized according to a number of Turkey’s regions, so you acquire a sense of place as you deepen your knowledge of Mediterranean cooking. Corn and creme fraiche biscuits, brown butter scrambled eggs, sun-dried tomato and pomegranate salad, and herbed fish cakes — this is Turkish food in its truest, most varied form with an aperture in every recipe. ($22, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘Lebanon: Cooking the Foods of My Homeland’ by Anissa Helou

In “Lebanon” (2026), a book both personal and anthropological, the famed Beirut-born author Helou “returns to her girlhood roots, examining the country’s regional cooking as she makes her way from place to place,” said The Boston Globe. She learns aspects of her native cuisine she had never fathomed. Imagine, then, what we nonnatives glean.

Yogurt is everywhere, from dressing fava bean fatteh (bread salad) to wee meatballs. Vegetables, like chicory, plus artichokes and potatoes, are braised in extra-virgin olive oil. Zucchini and cabbages are stuffed; fish is cooked with tahini. This is Lebanese cuisine in all its familiar, surprising brilliance. ($50, Ecco, Amazon)

‘The New Book of Middle Eastern Food’ by Claudia Roden

Be not fooled by the title. The Middle East is a construct created by people in the West. Across 500-plus pages, the “great cook” and “captivating food historian” Roden captures the foods of countries like Greece, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey, said the blog Cooks Without Borders. What do all these countries have in common? Yes, they abut the Mediterranean Sea, just not the well-trod Mediterranean of the average American tourist.

In the book’s 16 central chapters, Roden wanders from central categories such as yogurt, egg dishes, breads and pickles, showing how the countries of this region prepare stunning variations of common foodstuffs. Your kitchen repertoire will mature as handily as your new lens on geography will if you take an open-eyed tour of “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food” (1985). ($55, Knopf, Amazon)

‘The New Spanish Table’ by Anya von Bremzen

All the hits are here — Spanish tortilla, patatas bravas, various kinds of paella. But “The New Spanish Table” (2005) is also a snapshot of the revolution in cooking that happened across Spain during the early part of the 20th century, an era in which Spanish cuisine began “rapidly usurping the culinary dominance of Italy and France,” said Publishers Weekly.

Von Bremzen spent decades traveling across and writing about Spain. There is both modernity and history in this book. The text profiles the cooking of such influential figures as the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià and the Basque Country’s Juan Mari Arzak and provides recipes for centuries-old dishes from Madrid. ($25, ThriftBooks, Amazon)

Kazimierz Moczarski, the author of this “astonishing” book, was a Polish Resistance officer in the Second World War captured by Stalin’s secret police in 1945, and declared an enemy of the state and incarcerated for 11 years in Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison, said Frances Wilson in The Telegraph.

While there, he “endured 49 different types of torture”, one of which was to share a cell for 255 days in 1949 with the former SS Commander Jürgen Stroop, an “architect of the Holocaust and liquidator of the Warsaw ghetto, now awaiting execution”.

Moczarski, who had once tried to assassinate Stroop, discovered that his cellmate was entirely unrepentant, and willing to discuss his crimes freely. Lacking notebooks, he memorised what he was told and later used those memories to produce “Conversations with an Executioner” – a book first published in a censored edition in Poland in 1977, and only now fully translated into English. Composed largely of dialogue, it offers a unique perspective on the “narcissism of Nazism” – and deserves to be considered a “masterpiece”.

Moczarski, a trained journalist and former law student, “grasped that he had been handed the opportunity of a professional lifetime” when he was forced to bunk up with Stroop, said Roger Boyes in The Times. Guided by Moczarski’s promptings, Stroop told him everything: about his rise through the Nazi ranks; about his time setting up Jewish labour camps in southern Poland; and finally, about how he oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, which he still regarded as a “career high”.

With relish, Stroop recalled “tucking into steak and pommes frites” after spending the day watching flame-throwers being “blasted at Jews in hiding”. Asked if he ever pitied his victims, Stroop replied: “Praise be what hardens.” Superbly translated by Sean Gasper Bye, this book will “gnaw at you like a prison rat”.

Because Moczarski was forced to rely on memory, questions have been raised about the reliability of his account, said Jo Glanville in The Guardian. He argued that imprisonment had so intensified his recollections “that he could replay his conversations with Stroop as if they were a tape recording”. While writing the book after his release in 1956, he “fact-checked Stroop’s version of events” – and found that everything the SS general had told him seemed true. Moczarski died in 1975, two years before his book was finally published. It offers a “remarkable insight into the genesis and mindset of a Nazi war criminal”.

The Week is partnering with Stratford Literary Festival and Dorchester Literary Festival

Autumn is the busiest season of the publishing year, with new books by Richard Osman, Marlon James and Barbara Kingsolver set to hit shelves. That means it’s time to start planning which literary festivals to visit. The UK is home to an array of events where you can meet your favourite authors, attend talks and workshops, discover rising stars and, of course, come away with plenty of reading to keep you busy right through the winter. Here are some of our top picks.

Cheltenham Literature Festival

Launched in 1949, Cheltenham Literature Festival is still going strong over seven decades later. The revered author of “Empire of Pain”, Patrick Radden Keefe, will be discussing his latest book about the mysterious death of a 19-year-old in London with The Sunday Times chief literary critic Johanna Thomas-Corr, and Mary Beard will be making an appearance to examine the surprising ties between antiquity and the present. Budding writers can also book a lively two-hour workshop that will help them finally write their first novel.
cheltenhamfestivals.org; 9–18 October

Durham Book Festival

Pet Shop Boys icon Neil Tennant will join Durham University Chancellor Fiona Hill to talk about how growing up in Newcastle shaped his music, as part of the festival’s “Forged in the North” series. And if you’re interested in life writing, join Louise Doughty and Nicola Wilding to find out how they used letters and photos to examine the complex lives of family members for new memoirs. Bestselling author Susanna Clarke will also be introducing her historic novella, “The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City”.
newwritingnorth.com; 9–11 October

Dorchester Literary Festival

Dorchester Literary Festival returns in October for an exciting week of star-studded talks, debates and live events covering everything from poetry to politics. Highlights include Jung Chang discussing the follow-up to her epic memoir, “Wild Swans”; the creator of “Downton Abbey”, Julian Fellowes, reflecting on his glittering, multi-decade career; and bestselling author Victoria Hislop sharing details of her thrilling new novel set in post-war Greece. Don’t miss the literary walk hosted by Mark Chutter, chairman and academic director of the Thomas Hardy Society, followed by a cream tea.
Tickets are on sale from 31 August, and The Week readers can receive a 10% discount using code T4YVJSDM (valid for a maximum of 10 tickets bought before 30 September). dorchesterliteraryfestival.com, 17–24 October

London Literature Festival

Dua Lipa has curated this year’s festival at the Southbank Centre. The pop star and founder of the Service95 Book Club will be hosting a series of conversations with her favourite writers including Zadie Smith. Other literary stars to look out for include “Noughts & Crosses” author Malorie Blackman and the Sudanese Canadian poet Mustafa.
southbankcentre.co.uk; 20 October – 1 November

Stratford Literary Festival

Expect another jam-packed line-up at Stratford Literary Festival this year, with fascinating talks by the likes of Celia Imrie, Greg James and Marina Litvinenko. Baroness Margaret Hodge will be discussing her memoir, “Battle Axe”, and Bonnie Garmus will be talking about her new novel, “Peck and Peck”, about a young man whose life is turned upside down when he lands a job at a prestigious poetry journal. Neill Cameron will also be discussing the latest instalment of his bestselling kids’ graphic novel series “Donut Squad”.

The Week is the Festival’s media partner and there is an inclusive discount on tickets to some events for The Week readers with the code SLFW26A on checkout. stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk, 29 October–1 November

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Acclaimed Scottish journalist and nature writer Cal Flyn is the author of Thicker Than Water and Islands of Abandonment. In her new book, The Savage Landscape, she travels to remote corners of the world while wrestling with the meaning of wilderness. Below are her six favorite books.

‘Dart’ by Alice Oswald (2002)

A strange, potent, even mystical text, Dart is a polyphonic poem that flows down England’s River Dart from source to sea, as voiced by those who frequent it: anglers, canoeists, naturalists, sewer workers—and occasionally the otherworldly voice of the river itself. I recommend this book to someone about once a week. Buy it here.

‘The Light Eaters’ by Zöe Schlanger (2024)

A work of soulful science writing, The Light Eaters brings together many recent, confounding botanical findings that raise provocative questions about the sentience of the vegetable world. Intelligent and responsibly reported, but still wondrous and full of possibility. Buy it here.

‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ by Rebecca Solnit (2005)

This must be my favorite of Solnit’s books, amid stiff competition. (I also have a soft spot for 2003’s River of Shadows.) As befits the title, Solnit offers meandering meditations on exploration, art, and family history. Her book’s beauty reminds me of the pleasures of the freely roaming mind. Buy it here.

‘Fathoms’ by Rebecca Giggs (2020)

Elegantly interweaving natural history, science writing, philosophy, and cultural criticism, this contemplative book concerns the lives and impact of our cetacean cousins. Factual yet as haunting as any fiction. Giggs does what I’m looking for in a writer: She makes me look at the world anew. Buy it here.

‘Osebol’ by Marit Kapla (2019)

Composed of poetic extracts from interviews Kapla recorded with residents of a settlement deep in the Swedish forest, this book offers a collage of everyday gripes, lyricism expressed in everyday language, and unexpected glimpses of the sublime. I recognized those clashing chords from my time living on an island off the far north coast of Scotland. Buy it here.

‘The Animals in That Country’ by Laura Jean McKay (2020)

McKay’s novel is a mind-expanding work of speculative fiction in which an epidemic of “zooflu” allows people to suddenly hear the voices of animals. This is not the cutesy, singsong world of Disney, but a deafening chorus of demands and unsettling declarations. Hilarious, surprising, and disconcerting. Buy it here.

‘On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World’ by Florence Hazrat

Not so long ago, said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, “WRITINGLOOKEDLIKETHIS.” We’re all thus fortunate that punctuation gradually emerged, beginning with the Babylonians’ breakthrough idea of grouping words inside boxes. A bigger leap occurred in the 2nd century B.C. when Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of Alexandria’s unmatched library, came up with a system odots to indicate pauses amid written language’s rivers of words. In the years since, “the rules of punctuation have been codified, but they have never stopped evolving,” and Florence Hazrat’s entertaining new book ushers us through that history. The book is “no mere wacky usage guide,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. It’s instead “a lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries,” all of it undergirded by Hazrat’s “admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.”

“Dashes, colons, parentheses—they are all covered here, as are emojis,” said Jim Kelly in Air Mail. The ancestor of the question mark debuted in the 5th century while the spaces that we place between words didn’t exist until Irish monks introduced them three centuries later. Hazrat makes the particulars of each of these developments “utterly delightful.” Speaking of which, “let’s give a shoutout to Italian poet Iacopo Alpoleio,” the godfather of the exclamation point. Hazrat is “a keen user” of that particular mark, said Constance Higgins in The Telegraph (U.K.), and her spirited style can grow annoying. But she’s also willing to accept that her story can’t remain one of constant innovation. Most of the punctuation marks we know today were “cooked up in the rhetorical hotbeds of Renaissance Italy.” If we’re honest, “progress more or less stopped there.”

“There’s a lot of good in On the Mark,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, Hazrat’s achievement is undercut by her determination to enlist punctuation’s history in scoring political points. While she’s on firm ground when she notes that the editors who added exclamation points to Shakespeare’s plays forever changed how readers view the female characters, we quickly “go whizzing off into the land of political grievance.” Ignoring countless less hateful political figures who littered their pronouncements with exclamation points, she calls out Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels for the offense, then links Goebbels’ speechwriting to Donald Trump’s social media posts. She even finds proIsrael bias in the hyphen at the heart of the phrase “Israel-Palestine conflict.” Ignore the partisan preaching in this book, though, and you’re likely to agree with its central message. In short, “punctuation marks do matter.”

‘They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy’ by Lauren Collins

“The Wilmington Massacre constituted a watershed moment in American history,” said Sally Greene in American Scholar. Lauren Collins’ “brilliant” new book isn’t the first to shed light on the events of Nov. 10, 1898, when a mob of armed white men launched a deadly attack on the Black political and business leaders of Wilmington, N.C., ending the city’s rule by a multiracial coalition and its successful post–Civil War run as a Black-majority municipality. At least 22 and perhaps hundreds of Black residents were killed in the violence. But Collins, a white New Yorker writer who was born and raised in Wilmington, “expands the timeline and widens the lens,” building on David Zucchino’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning Wilmington’s Lie to show how the massacre’s aftermath continues to shape her hometown more than 125 years after it inspired the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters across the South.

Collins’ book is “distinguished by its deep interest in the origins of the horror,” said The Economist. She opens by introducing an enslaved teenager working on a 1770s plantation and, while developing the stories of four families still tied to Wilmington, builds toward the 1898 clash. The elite planners of the coup wanted power back, and they ensured that the militia they assembled was “armed to the teeth in advance.” As Collins follows the ripple effects of the resulting massacre, “she rightly measures the crime not just in violence but in loss of livelihoods, opportunities, connections, and futures.”

Collins’ book “uncovers history that even many longtime Wilmingtonians don’t know,” said John Staton in Wilmington’s Star News. One of the white families she chronicles is celebrated locally for having brought European workers to the area in the early 1900s, but Collins notes that the landowner who did so was an 1898 insurrectionist who refused to hire Black workers. She also connects 1898 to the city’s troubling school desegregation battles of the 1960s. It’s “sobering” to realize that Collins was right when she decided that the story of the massacre couldn’t be contained to its own time period, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “It had numerous antecedents, and its effects continued to reverberate across generations.”

This summer, Dominic Sessa stars as a young Anthony Bourdain in “Tony”. The “coming-of-age” film set during a summer restaurant job which “helped shape the beloved late chef and TV host into the icon he ultimately became”, said Deadline.

Alongside his work as a chef and presenter, Bourdain was also “one of the best food memoirists of all time”, said Izzy Titherington in The i Paper. His “seminal” 2000 book “Kitchen Confidential” opened readers’ eyes with an “unfiltered” portrayal of “work in professional kitchens”, including everything from poor food practices to his own “struggles with drug use”. Here are some of our other favourite culinary memoirs.

‘Blood, Bones, and Butter’ by Gabrielle Hamilton

“If Bourdain wrote like a rock star, Hamilton writes like a poet,” said Abhya Adlakha in Esquire India. She rose to fame at the helm of Prune, which she described as a “tiny restaurant with 30 seats and a kitchen the size of a school bus”. Bourdain called her “magnificent” book “simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever.” The sentences are “so beautiful you forget to be impressed that she's also feeding people”. The opening to her work, describing a lamb roast in a New Jersey field, with her “bohemian mother in espadrilles” is “one of the great first chapters in American memoir, full stop”.

‘The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef’ by Marco Pierre White

This memoir is simply “exhilarating”, said Titherington in The i Paper. White gives us an insight into the “obsession and sacrifice” behind his journey as the “youngest-ever chef in the UK (and the youngest anywhere at the time) to earn three Michelin stars – and then the first to give them all back”. We follow him through his working-class upbringing in Leeds, dealing with the death of his mother when he was six, and his subsequent “rise as one of the culinary world’s original rock-star chefs”.

‘Cellar Rat’ by Hannah Selinger

“If you harbour romantic ideals of what it’s like to work in a fast-paced, high-pressure restaurant, here’s a reality check,” said Jim Webster in Smithsonian Magazine. Hannah Selinger’s memoir explores her years working in some of the “most recognisable temples of gastronomy” in New York. For all the adrenaline, in a professional kitchen “drama can be more like trauma, and a lot of the actual romance falls far short of ideal”. She tells “raw” stories, “names names” and “takes responsibility for many of the things that happen along the way”, in adventures that are “as believable as they are heartbreaking”.

‘Accidentally on Purpose’ by Kristen Kish

Having grown up as a South Korean adoptee in the American Midwest, Kish “interlaces kitchen anecdotes, the rigours of culinary school and restaurant life with deeper reckonings about identity, belonging and love”, said Saskia Kemsley in The Standard. Still only 42, Michelin‑trained Kish won the 10th season of “Top Chef”, and, most recently, became the “Emmy‑nominated host of the show she once watched as a young child”. She writes “candidly” about coming out, the “pressures and pleasures of professional kitchens, and how comfort can take shape in both food and relationships”. This is not just about the prodigal rise of a chef, but a “reflective account of how an unpredictable life can resolve into purpose on its own terms”.

‘Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef’ by Brigid Washington

In Washington’s “fast-moving coming-of-age” memoir, there are “injuries, flirtations, squabbles, name-drops, and dishes gone awry”, said Bettina Makalintal in Eater. It has been described as “‘The Devil Wears Prada’ for the ‘yes chef’ generation”. The work explores her “gruelling” days at the Culinary Institute of America, where she “reluctantly chose to enrol after a breakup pushes her to get out of North Carolina”. She reconstructs “vivid scenes” and recalls distant characters “with a sense of ease”. This book will appeal to “anyone who’s been curious about culinary school but hasn’t made the commitment themself. You might even learn a few things.”

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.