Jan Morris’ life “seems impossibly rich”, said Charlie Gilmour in The Guardian. As James Morris, he experienced the world first from inside the British elite, “with all the opportunities that entailed”. After winning a scholarship to Lancing College, he joined the Army, and was sent on “plum postwar deployments to Venice and Trieste.

Oxford followed, then The Times, where he became a star foreign correspondent. Morris scooped the world in 1953 with the news of the British expedition’s conquest of Everest. He interviewed Che Guevara, and watched Adolf Eichmann “trembling” in the dock. He wrote a great many books – travel, history, biography, memoir – which were mainly popular and often critically acclaimed. “And, over the next two decades, he transitioned from James to Jan.” But whether James or Jan, Morris was, above all, a writer. “It will make an excellent and not unentertaining piece of memoir!” she wrote, after her vaginoplasty at a clinic in Casablanca in 1972. Sara Wheeler’s biography is “sensitive, beautifully written and masterly”, and makes space for all the complexities.

“In her later years, Morris liked to say kindness was the most important thing in life,” said Justin Marozzi in The Sunday Times. “Yet kindness is not the quality that lingers most in the mind after reading this stunning portrait” – certainly not on the evidence of four of Morris’ children. “Monumental selfishness would be closer to the mark.” (Her eldest son, Mark, called her “a narcissist in her inability to empathise”.) “The rock” to which Jan always returned, from her “ego-driven peregrinations”, was her partner of 70 years, Elizabeth. What it all cost Elizabeth, Wheeler writes, “no one can know”. Wheeler, an admired travel writer, was “the perfect choice to write this biography ... she is as fierce and flinty as her subject”, and takes no prisoners. “Why did she dress like a Walmart version of the Queen?” she asks.

Morris “was an elusive, self-contradictory person who makes a terrific subject for a biography”, said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The New Statesman: a woman who was once a man; a brilliant writer who was also a shamelessly lazy hack; a loyal friend who was an “aloof and unhelpful parent”. Wheeler, “brisk and sardonic”, lays out the facts as she finds them. She has exactly the right blend of sympathy and critical detachment, said Piers Brendon in Literary Review. And “she does not pretend to omniscience, leaving some things up in the air”, such as whether Morris’ transition gave her fulfilment. “Seldom have I read such an enthralling biography.”

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

“As ever with Ben Lerner’s novels, the plot of Transcription is sparse, propelled mostly by the characters’ winding speech and the narrator’s thoughts,” said Hannah Gold in Harper’s. But even at 144 pages, it’s a “remarkable” book, one that suggests human consciousness, and thus our individual experience of the self, has been forever changed by the phones most of us now carry in our pockets. “The novel is by turns slapstick and sincere in its consideration of digital devices”: It opens with its unnamed Lerner-like narrator accidentally dropping his phone in a sink of water, triggering a foolish bit of subterfuge. When this middle-aged poet meets with his former mentor, a renowned 90-year-old intellectual, for what’s likely to be the older man’s final interview, he pretends that the broken phone is recording, then creates a faked transcript. As events play out, Lerner’s writing “crackles with new insights, images, motifs.”

“In another writer’s hands, the novel would be a comic tale of comeuppance,” said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian. “Lerner is more ambitious.” The voice of the German-born mentor, Thomas, unfolds in “layered, associative sentences” that “skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect,” and although the narrator is lambasted when, in the novel’s middle section, he reveals at a symposium lecture after Thomas’ death that he reconstructed Thomas’ words. Lerner doesn’t end there. He adds a third section that finds the narrator in dialogue with an old friend, Max, who was also Thomas’ only son. That pair’s conversation touches on technology, parenting, and the Thomas they both knew, and yet the bristling intelligence of their back-and-forth is “at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue: how to get a teenage girl to eat.” Max has watched his only daughter waste away, pained that she seems, in his eyes, to be rejecting the life provided to her because that life is a lie.

Such ideas “risk becoming arid, and there are certainly times when Lerner overexplains them,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. But “Lerner’s method is to flicker between humor and heartbreak,” and Transcription “mines a lot of humor from the bumbling of its poet-narrator.” Max recalls having his own final interview with Thomas, a remote phone-assisted conversation he recorded while Thomas lay dying in isolation because of Covid restrictions, yet that scene too is “ultimately reconfigured in surprising ways, leaving its meanings bracingly indefinite.” It remains a striking moment, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. These days, “smartphones have become so integral to our lives that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, is winning.”

‘The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness’ by Arthur C. Brooks

“You might call Arthur C. Brooks ‘the happiness professor,’” said Anna Maxted in The Telegraph (U.K.). For the past decade, after all, the 61-year-old author and former president of the center-right American Enterprise Institute has been a Harvard faculty member teaching a popular course on the science of happiness. Beyond that—“and what a rare thing”—when he speaks about the importance of aspiring to what he calls moral beauty, he embodies the practice. His latest best seller, The Meaning of Your Life, aims to help anyone who finds that, even while enjoying successes by many measures, their existence feels empty. Self-focus alone, of course, “doesn’t bring happiness.” Even so, he shows how it can, when done right, lead to a surer sense of life purpose.

Brooks is “remarkably ill-equipped” to dispense such wisdom, said Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker. He has made a career of parroting the fashionable ideas of the conservative establishment while avoiding taking meaningful stands. Now that he’s turned to self-help, a tack that has earned him hefty speaking fees and the privilege of co-authoring a 2023 best seller with Oprah Winfrey, the counsel he offers gets readers only so far. “Who would deny,” for example, “that we would all do better to turn off our phones, interact with other human beings, and maybe even go outside for a walk every once in a while?” Unfortunately, Brooks misuses science, and he “struggles when he strays into the rugged realm of philosophy.” Not surprisingly, he advises against trying to ascertain what’s true and right, or fighting for it. Instead, “he eschews all convictions, save those about what makes people feel better.”

Even so, much of Brooks’ advice rates as “wise and sometimes urgently needed counsel,” said Matt Reynolds in Christianity Today. He tells us to cultivate loving relationships, to seek out beauty, to pursue a professional calling, to ponder big questions, to engage in regular spiritual or philosophical study, and to learn from suffering rather than try to avoid it. When it comes to life’s meaning, though, his advice “remains curiously individualistic.” In short, you have to figure it out yourself.

David Szalay was “praised by the judges for its originality” when his pared-back novel, “Flesh”, scooped the Booker Prize last year, said The Times. “Yet some readers have found it strangely familiar.”

Critics have noticed “striking similarities” between “Flesh” and Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film “Barry Lyndon”, which itself is adapted from William Thackeray’s 1844 novel. While some are “flummoxed” by Szalay’s reluctance to acknowledge the extent of the parallels, others are convinced he is “playing a game with readers, sending them on a literary treasure hunt”.

‘Near-identical trajectories’

With its “sparse prose” and constant repetition of the word ‘OK’, the British-Hungarian author’s novel caused quite a stir when it won the 2025 Booker Prize, said The Independent. The awards chair, Roddy Doyle, said the panel of judges had “never read anything quite like it”.

The rags-to-riches tale begins in Hungary, where 15-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a housing estate. While the eponymous lead in “Barry Lyndon” hails from Ireland, the characters “follow near-identical trajectories: they enlist in the army, marry wealthy women, grieve their sons and clash with their stepsons, and lose everything they have earned later in their lives”.

Despite the almost indistinguishable plot, few critics pointed this out when “Flesh” won the Booker Prize. One of the first to note the similarities was writer Aled Maclean-Jones who in November 2025 described “Flesh” as “quite clearly a near beat-for-beat mirror” both of Thackeray’s novel and Kubrick’s movie, “to such a level I’d almost call it a retelling”, in a post on Substack.

“Szalay has the whole plot, the entire arc, supplied to him”, said David Sexton in The Standard. “There is nothing remotely wrong about it. It’s not plagiarism. Indeed it could be considered a vital tribute to a fantastic film”.

Reader ‘sleuthing’

When Szalay appeared on Dua Lipa’s “Service95 Book Club” podcast he listed five books including “Hamlet” and Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” as having influenced “Flesh”, said The Independent. But he made no mention of Thackeray’s novel or Kubrick’s film.

Asked directly whether he had “Barry Lyndon” in mind when writing “Flesh”, he told Anthony Cummins in The Observer that he had seen the film when he was 20, “and the rags-to-riches arc was an influence”.

But in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “This Cultural Life” due to air this week, Szalay “downplays the connection”, said The Times. When asked about whether the film is a “direct reference”, the author tells host John Wilson, “No, I wouldn’t go that far”, adding “Kubrick wasn’t really at the front of my mind, I don’t think.”

“I don’t understand why, at this stage, he won’t own up to it more”, Sexton told The Times. But Cummins had his own theory. “I think he is more artful than people are willing to credit”, he told the newspaper. The similarities could be “more akin to ‘Easter eggs’ in films, hidden messages for fans” to try and find. Perhaps he feels, “‘Why spoil it by talking people through the book in that way?’ There’s fun for the reader in sleuthing”.

The best cookbooks feature throughlines. These days, the threads in new cookbooks star the people behind the books, functioning as mirrors that showcase a cook’s technique, their family story or the kind of food the author likes to make. “Hot Sour Salty Sweet,” published in 2000, looks out, not in.

While researching the text, its authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, traveled along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia over a few decades. The pair visited villages, snapped photos and documented recipes from both sides of the monumental body of water that defines and feeds parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and China. The book is epic, like the tome’s size, its 330-plus pages loaded into a format that’s far wider than it’s tall. “Hot Sour Salty Sweet” is not easy to hold in one’s hand, much like the region’s diverse grandeur.

Variations of a common theme

The cookbook’s 12 chapters wander from Sauces, Chile Pastes and Salsas to Sweets and Drinks, with moorings at Simple Soups, Salads, Rice and Rice Dishes, Noodles and Noodle Dishes, Mostly Vegetables, Fish and Seafood, Poultry, Beef, Pork, Snacks and Street Food. Each chapter is a head-spinning exercise in dissimilarity, with so many common ingredients treated wildly unalike.

Take the seafood chapter. A recipe from Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s “great inland lake,” melds smoked fish and unripe mangoes with a dressing of vinegar, shallots, galangal and fish sauce — tart, funk, spunk, pop. In tom thit heo, from southern Vietnam, shrimp and thin slices of pork shoulder frolic in a stir-fry heady with lemongrass and black pepper. Simplest of all, salt-grilled catfish has its flesh slashed and loaded with coarse salt before a turn on a grill. Each dish and recipe howls with a common sense of place. Listen closely, and you hear the soft noise of distinguishability.

The personal as point of entry

There’s no foolhardy attempt at comprehensiveness in “Hot Sour Salty Sweet.” An essay about a border town on the edges of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar; a return to the village Sangkhom in northeastern Thailand to visit pals; a profile of a Laotian rice noodle maker working from her home on stilts near the Chinese border — Alford and Duguid covered thousands of miles of territory, but their experiences there are theirs alone.

Decades before the notion of the “exotic” was proscribed, rightfully, and white journalists began learning how to remove themselves from the center of every story, Alford and Duguid, who are both white, liaised with more than 15 Southeast Asian ethnic groups for “Hot Sour Salty Sweet.” They did so with curiosity, capturing their subjects with careful research, stirring photos and clear-eyed writing. This is documentation as honoring.

Alan Bennett once said that “if you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize”. Well, here he is at 91, serving up “another volume of his punctiliously kept and endlessly diverting diaries”, said Nick Curtis in The Independent.

“Enough Said” covers the years 2016 to 2024: “the pandemic, the rise of populism, and the likely last spurt of his formidable creative output”, with the play “Allelujah!”, the film “The Choral” and the novella “Killing Time”.

The general theme is of loss and “diminution”, as deafness, lack of mobility, cataracts and other medical problems intrude.

The “dramatis personae of his life” are dying off: Maggie Smith, his “adored” friend and collaborator; Jonathan Miller, an old friend and rival from his “Beyond the Fringe” days; and Queen Elizabeth II, his subject in the play “A Question of Attribution”. Revolted by Brexit and Boris Johnson, Bennett feels that his version of England is dying too, “its libraries closing and its churches unappreciated”. But he and his partner Rupert Thomas “still rummage through junk shops”, “frequent out-of-the-way churches” and eat fish and chips.

More than once, Bennett “apologises to the reader for saying things he’s said many times before”, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator. And he certainly does often return “to his most treasured material – family, and his exemplary standing as the grammar school boy who brought off an Oxford first”. (“Does it mean you’ve come top?” his mother asked when the results arrived.)

His memories of his Yorkshire boyhood are “wonderfully evocative of a lost world”. Rather less rewarding “are his highly conventional opinions” on politics, which “are precisely the same” as those of every other millionaire Londoner “living between Primrose Hill and Hampstead Garden Suburb”.

But his “relish” for spoken language is still there. He notes a woman in a Yorkshire newsagent, seeing news of a lightning strike, admitting cheerfully: “I love it when they have it nasty down south.”

Even as a young man, Bennett was a bit of a fogey, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Back in the 1980s, he wrote about the elderly “with piercing tenderness” in his “Talking Heads” series. “So old age feels like a homecoming, a phase for which he has been practising all of his life.” Yet he’s still suffering “adolescent doubts”. When he enters a room full of people, he feels about 16. He worries about whether he has made his mark; he fears being remembered as a “chronicler of the toasted teacake”. “In an age of curated self-belief, his vulnerabilities feel refreshing, his reticence almost radical.”

‘Judy Blume: A Life’ by Mark Oppenheimer

“Writing the first big biography of Judy Blume had to come with enormous pressure,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. Blume is “a treasure, an icon”: Her books, mostly written for young adults, have sold 90 million copies and earned widespread adoration because, at a fortuitous time, she was “a wild and bold truth teller” about pivotal adolescent experiences that many adults didn’t like to talk about, including menstruation, sex, divorced parents, and loneliness. Mark Oppenheimer, a veteran journalist and author, confesses at the end of his new book that he fears he may have under-delivered. But “he is being too hard on himself.” He has written a “thoughtful, thorough” biography in which Blume comes across as a breakthrough cultural figure “firmly shaped by the time, place, and culture of her birth.”

Oppenheimer’s book is at its best in its “lucid, sensitive evocations of Blume’s suburban girlhood,” said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. Born in 1938 to a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, Blume was encouraged by her parents to read broadly, exercise her creativity, and live without any shame about the human body. When she began writing after college, marriage, and early motherhood, those attitudes shaped her run of early blockbusters, beginning with 1970’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, but we benefit from also having learned of the conflicts and sorrows that shaped Blume’s coming of age. In describing Blume’s best work, Oppenheimer “can be overly besotted.” But he also includes biographical material “that Blume might have bristled at,” including the abortions she had at 39 and 41. It has been reported that Blume, now 88, stopped speaking to Oppenheimer when he was well into the project, but nothing in the book seems out of place in any serious biography.

The book is strong in its general insights as well, said Meghan C. Kruger in The Wall Street Journal. “Though Blume was gifted and prolific, Oppenheimer suggests that two revolutions enabled her superstardom.” First, her early books coincided with the rise of paperbacks and mall bookstores, allowing young readers to purchase a Blume novel for just $1.25 in 1972 (the equivalent of less than $10 today). Also, the cultural moment was right. Though there were always some objections to the explicitness of Blume’s novels for both teens and adults, parents of the ’70s were more open than their predecessors to messages about body positivity, and the era’s media was less likely than today’s to judge her marital infidelity and divorces as disqualifying for a public figure guiding teens’ life choices. In the end, “Blume might seem prickly,” but “she also comes across as witty, optimistic, devoted to her craft, and sincere in her desire to nurture relationships with readers.”

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Spring is a time for renewal, and that includes refreshing your ‘to be read’ pile. This April, readers have plenty of new books to look forward to, including a metafictional exploration of memory, a look at the effects of family vlogging and a mysterious depiction of gentrification in Brooklyn.

‘The Witch’ by Marie NDiaye; translated by Jordan Stump

Translated to English for the first time since its publication in France in 1996, Marie NDiaye’s novel is “compact and surreal” while “unspooling more mysteries than it resolves,” said The New York Times. The book, “narrated by a down-on-her-luck sorceress stuck in a disintegrating marriage in a drab provincial town,” highlights the French author’s “recurring themes of domestic entanglement and betrayal.”

The book is “witty, dreamlike, unsettling and enchanting,” said The Booker Prizes. It “brings the mysteries of womanhood and motherhood into sharp relief” and leaves readers “teetering on the edge, unbalanced by questions as seemingly unbreakable relationships break down left and right.” (out now, $18, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online’ by Fortesa Latifi

As courts grapple with the effects of addictive social media on young people, journalist Fortesa Latifi’s debut “scrutinizes the highly profitable world of family vloggers and momfluencers,” said Publishers Weekly. The book features interviews with influencers and their children, along with “nannies, psychologists and social media marketing managers.”

The author surveys various aspects of the industry, from “the odd preponderance of Mormon influencers” and the “discomfiting popularity of teen mom accounts” to the “over-the-top viciousness of anti-momfluencer forums.” Latifi observes how “understandable it is that parents are willing to swap their family’s privacy for financial stability, given the greater lack of structural support for families in the U.S,” the outlet said. It is a “perceptive, often stomach-churning exposé.” (out now, $30, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner’s latest is a “deeply pleasurable, absorbing book” and a “metafictional meditation on memory and influence,” and the way “technology has changed our relationship to both,” said Literary Hub. It features a “series of moving portraits: the anxious interviewer, the aging genius, the reflective son.” Readers may get the sense that “what he’s doing really shouldn’t work” and that it wouldn’t if it were in anyone else’s hands. But it’s not, and “so it does,” the outlet said. “Thank goodness.” (out now $25, Macmillan, Amazon)

‘Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID’ by Nicholas Enrich

Former civil servant Nicholas Enrich, who worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development under four presidents, was optimistic about his agency’s future after Trump won a second term in 2024. “The authors of Project 2025 liked their work, as did the incoming secretary of state, Marco Rubio,” said the Times. Unfortunately, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency “had other plans,” as the author shows in this “ground-level account — part memoir, part government tell-all — of the agency’s demise.” (April 14, $29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Livonia Chow Mein’ by Abigail Savitch-Lew

This debut novel is a “vivid, savory blend of family saga, cultural history and detective story, rich with urban life and lore,” said Kirkus Reviews. The story follows activist Lina Rodriguez Armstrong and journalist Sadie Chin as they piece together the history of a section of Brownsville, Brooklyn, decades after a fire ravaged the neighborhood,

Savitch-Lew shows “prodigious narrative gifts” in her debut novel, weaving Sadie and Lina’s “tension-filled transactions in the present with the life stories of the Wong family,” as it makes its “uneasy and often heartbreaking way through a 20th century of world wars, economic upheaval and racism as it’s enforced by institutions and perpetrated between individuals.” (April 21, $29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

The Week is partnering with the Hay Festival. Use TWKHF2026 for your 10% discount on all tickets; hayfestival.org/hay-on-wye*

Every spring, thousands of bookworms flock to the Welsh market town of Hay-on-Wye for an 11-day extravaganza of talks, signings, workshops and panels with the planet’s leading thinkers and writers. The world-renowned Hay Festival is 39 this year, and the programme is as jam-packed as ever. It runs from 21-31 May 2026, and there are more than 600 events to choose from, including plenty to keep the whole family entertained. Tickets for talks with Emma Thompson, Gisèle Pelicot and Maggie O'Farrell have already sold out but here is our pick of the other highlights.

Star names and free films

On 23 May, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo will be discussing her latest book, “Good Good Loving”, with novelist Yvvette Edwards. The talented authors will reflect on writing about multigenerational families and putting complex female characters at the heart of their books.

Other big names to look out for include Ian McEwan who will be talking about his new novel with chair of the Wellcome Trust Julia Gillard on 25 May; and queen of crime fiction Val McDermid will meet author Fflur Dafydd the following day to spill on her latest thriller, “Silent Bones”. On 27 May, Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout will be making an appearance, meeting The Guardian’s literary critic Chris Power to talk about her latest novel and her knack for writing relatable characters.

If politics is more your bag, on 22 May, activist Malala Yousafzai will discuss with BBC journalist Anna Foster how it felt to be thrust onto the public stage. And on 29 May, Decca Aitkenhead of The Sunday Times will have a candid conversation with former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon about her recent memoir.

There will also be a selection of free, short films curated by MUBI shown from 10am-2pm on 23 May; be sure to pop in and check the schedule at the beginning of the day. And, every morning, early risers can kick off the day with a yoga and breathwork session at the Creative Hub.

Kid-friendly events

Theatr Cymru and poet Mererid Hopwood will be hosting a drama workshop on 23 May, giving kids the chance to devise their own magical story in the Family Garden Marquee. Also that morning little ones aged three to 11 can join Make & Take Crafting, getting their creative juices flowing with print-making and junk modelling from recycled materials. And for aspiring scientists, book tickets for the talk with space scientist Sheila Kanani at the Spring Stage.

All that fun and learning is hungry work: at the canteen, you’ll find child-sized portions and tasty snacks, or you could bring a picnic to enjoy in the gardens while you peruse your new books.

* Discount code is valid for 10% off Hay Festival 2026 event tickets until 23:59 on 20 May 2026, excludes E-gift cards, parking, lounge passes, books and general gift shop items. Cannot be used in conjunction with other discounts or offers.

“The 20th century was not short of famous people who led ludicrously unsustainable lives,” said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. But there can’t be many “more ludicrous or unsustainable” lives than that of Liza Minnelli. The 80-year-old singer and actor, best known for playing the bowler hat-wearing Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”, received lessons in “how to be famous” from her mother, Judy Garland, who died from an overdose aged 47.

“Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine,” she writes: her early life was spent negotiating Garland’s “mood swings and addictions”; she inherited a lifelong addiction to alcohol and drugs, and a tendency to fall for unsuitable men.

In her long-awaited memoir, Minnelli catalogues the highs and lows without ever sinking into self-pity. Full of sentences that verge on self-parody – “I was married to a gay man at the same time as I was engaged to two other men” – it is both “heart-rending” and hilarious. “If there’s a more enthralling celebrity memoir out this year, I’ll eat my bowler hat.”

The book’s “strongest section” is that detailing Minnelli’s “complicated childhood”, said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. Garland split from Liza’s father – the Italian film director Vincente Minnelli – in 1951. Soon after this, Garland attempted suicide for the first time, and Liza was forced to become “Mama’s mama” – or, as she puts it, her “nurse, doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one”.

Once Minnelli embarked upon her own career, she also had to negotiate her mother’s tempestuous jealousy, said Tanya Gold in The Observer. Appearing with Garland at the London Palladium aged 18, Minnelli received a loud ovation only to hear her mother whisper to the producer: “Harold, get her off my f**king stage.”

Despite wanting to “grow up differently”, Minnelli couldn’t stop herself “repeating old patterns”, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. She details her abuse of Valium and booze, and her often disastrous love life: married and divorced four times, she was also briefly engaged to Peter Sellers, and had an affair with Martin Scorsese.

While Minnelli isn’t afraid to call out bad behaviour – she describes her fourth husband, David Gest, as a “pasty-faced jerk with weird hair” – there are few traces of bitterness: Minnelli is a “funny and generous” narrator. Co-written by her friend Michael Feinstein in an “intimate, chatty style”, this is a “high-kicking hoofer of a book”.

‘Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945’ by Ian Buruma

“Dictators thrive not on love but on indifference,” said Kevin Peraino in The New York Times. That’s the underlying message of Ian Buruma’s “crisply told and uncomfortably relevant” new history of wartime Berlin. The veteran author and journalist has pulled from letters, diaries, interviews with aging survivors, and many other sources to chart how life and behavior shifted in the German capital from 1939 to 1945. During most of those years, “Berliners turned looking away into an art form,” first by flocking to concerts and movies as if nothing had changed, later by ignoring the danger of Allied air raids while filling soccer stadiums. Jewish citizens had no such choice, of course, though not because their neighbors were all committed Nazis. Buruma’s book, by detailing the moral compromises they made, mounts “a passionate challenge to the corrosive power of indifference.”

The book’s diary-style structure “lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints,” said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. “Students, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are all allowed to speak for themselves,” and we see both the hard choices some people had to make and how prone others are to evasions. British bombing of the city of 4.3 million began in August 1940. By that point, the 80,000 or so Jewish residents who hadn’t fled were being herded into segregated housing. A year later, deportations were escalating, and one elderly Jewish woman is quoted as saying that in every subsequent encounter with an acquaintance, the first question asked was “Are you going to commit suicide, or will you let them deport you?” By 1944, when much of the city lay in ruins, the terror spread. Nazi “snatch squads” began roaming the streets, shooting or hanging citizens deemed to be “defeatists.”

“Of course, no descent into moral darkness is total,” said Katja Hoyer
in the Financial Times. Buruma finds a few heroes, including a woman
who ran a resistance group and who spent the last days of the war roaming the streets surreptitiously scribbling “Nein”—“no” to Hitler’s
entire project—on walls and houses. More typical is Buruma’s own Dutch father, Leo, one of hundreds of thousands of citizens of nations occupied by Germany who were forced to work in Berlin. Twenty-year-old Leo didn’t support the Nazis, but he enjoyed the aspects of city life that he could, and was left burdened with guilt. Though the author is sympathetic, he admits that his father made compromises to survive. And though he calls his book a love letter to Berlin, “the depressing moral of Stay Alive is that most people don’t challenge the circumstances they find themselves in. They adapt to them.”

‘Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane’ by Lindy West

“What Lindy West has signed up for with Adult Braces is a horror show,”
said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Among her many readers, there will be plenty telling her loudly, via Instagram or otherwise, that she is stupid or weak or tragic to have chosen to live with her husband in a throuple after discovering that he’d secretly acquired two girlfriends—one permanently.
Not that West’s decision is news to her fans, many who were following her online well before she scored a huge hit with her fat-and-proud-of-it 2016 memoir, Shrill. West, husband Aham, and their partner, Roya, announced the arrangement in a video in 2022. But Adult Braces, West’s fourth book, details how she moved from being angry to accepting a new living arrangement, and because it’s her most personal public self-examination, it’s “also the most brutal to bear witness to.”

West clearly wasn’t happy when she learned that Aham wanted a second woman in his life, said Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. In fact, “most of Adult Braces is spent describing the road trip West took from Seattle to Florida and back again to process her devastation.” And although she insists she’s found contentment in the life the three now share, “what she tells us is often disconcerting.” Rather than being the caring person West says he is, Aham appears “manipulative and sleazy,” lying about his other relationships and then guilting West into polyamory by implying that she, as a white woman, might be less sensitive than he, as a Black man, is to the way monogamy acts as a form of slavery.

West’s book proves to be “a sightseeing guide for polyamorous red flags,” starting with Aham’s behavior, said Ashley Ray in Harper’s Bazaar. West also mistakenly believes that she is being more righteously progressive by agreeing to be part of a throuple. When West and Roya eventually strike up an amorous relationship, West makes sure we know that hot, skinny Roya developed a crush on her. Still, Adult Braces isn’t about the birth of an unusual admirable romantic relationship. “It’s about West’s difficult journey to put her life back together around the person who tore it apart in the first place.”

Reading is often a cherished solo activity but attending a literary festival can be a great way to connect with other bookworms, meet your favourite authors and discover new books. Most UK cities host their own dedicated events, spanning everything from crime writing and historical fiction to poetry. These are some of our favourites.

Cambridge Literary Festival

This excellent event is a great excuse to plan a weekend trip to Cambridge. The five-day festival includes an eclectic mix of talks from leading writers, thinkers and speakers. Among the highlights this year is a talk by Frances Wilson about the enigma of Muriel Spark; a lecture from former leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas about the state of the natural world; Alan Hollinghurst reflecting on the books that have inspired his work; and Zadie Smith discussing her exhilarating new essay collection “Dead and Alive”. On the final day of the festival, The Observer is hosting an event with debut novelists the paper considers to be rising stars of fiction.

22-26 April, cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

Bath Literature Festival

This year promises another stand-out line-up of speakers in the historic city of Bath. Look out for talks by Sarah Wynn-Williams on her bestselling memoir lifting the lid on her time at Facebook; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall discussing his campaign to get people to eat more fibre; and Anthony Horowitz talking about his latest gripping thriller with author Joe Haddow. The festival is also hosting a series of guided walking tours, including a Jane Austen-themed event where visitors will be taken to explore locations featured in the celebrated author’s books. And there are some wonderful workshops on offer for budding writers too.

16-24 May, bathfestivals.org.uk

Stratford Literary Festival

As the birthplace of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon is the perfect setting for a literary extravaganza. Its spring iteration returns in May with an exciting calendar of events. Food writer Felicity Cloake is on the menu, discussing her first foray into fiction, while Tim Spectre has a new book on the power of fermented food. Former chancellor and home secretary Sajid Javid is appearing, having written a critically acclaimed memoir, and Blake Morrison will be reflecting on the art of life writing. There is also a range of special events for children including a vibrant production of “Rumpelstiltskin” and a writing masterclass with “Witch Light” author Zohra Nabi.

7-10 May, stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk

Hay Festival

This popular literary event recently unveiled its star-studded line-up for this year, with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Gisèle Pelicot and Emma Thompson among the headline names. The programme is bursting with fascinating conversations, including Ali Smith discussing her latest novel “Glyph” with filmmaker Sarah Wood; Yvette Edwards talking to Bernardine Evaristo about her book “Good Good Loving”; and crime queen Val McDermid joining author Fflur Dafydd to introduce her thriller “Silent Bones”. Other literary stars making an appearance include Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell and Douglas Stuart. There will also be a jam-packed schedule of panels, genre-themed events and conversations about book-to-screen adaptations with the likes of Emerald Fennell discussing her take on “Wuthering Heights”. It’s not to be missed.

21-31 May, hayfestival.com

Bradford Literature Festival

Bradford was named the UK City of Culture for 2025 thanks in part to this stand-out literary festival. Dedicated to ensuring culture is accessible to all, the 10-day event offers a wide range of concession tickets. While the programme is yet to be announced, if 2025’s line-up is anything to go it’s one to watch. Last year the festival hosted more than 700 events with talks from the likes of Lemn Sissay, Grace Dent, Ash Sarkar and Celia Imrie.

3-12 July, bradfordlitfest.co.uk

‘Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity’ by Matthew Avery Sutton

As our country nears its 250th anniversary, “the time is right” for a sweeping new history of Christianity’s role in our national story, said Heath W. Carter in The Atlantic. Matthew Avery Sutton, a historian at Washington State University, begins his account with the arrival in the Americas of European explorers and missionaries more than 500 years ago, and his book “argues convincingly that the quest for Christian America is a perennial national obsession.” Though the U.S. often presents itself as a secular nation, Sutton points out that nearly two-thirds of U.S. citizens today identify as Christians. He also declares, “a bit too boldly,” that the history of American Christianity is the history of America and vice versa. Still, “there is no doubting Christianity’s centrality to U.S. history, for better and for worse.” Sutton, to his credit, is alert to both effects.

First, he identifies four main streams of American Christianity, said Brenda Wineapple in The New York Times. In his taxonomy, “conservatives” are practicing Christians who want little from the state but to be left alone to worship. He uses the label “revivalists” to describe evangelical Christians, who by definition seek to spread their faith. Sutton’s “liberals” value religious pluralism while his “liberationists,” consisting largely of Black churchgoers, promote a form of Christianity that demands justice for the oppressed. But while he “celebrates the vitality of American Christianity,” the “nub” of his argument is that this vitality is a product of a largely nominal separation of church from state that empowered, in his words, an “unofficial, Protestant-infused establishment.” That argument feels paranoid, and “diminishes the very real contribution of the First Amendment to the nation.”

Though Sutton “tries to be fair to each of his subjects,” said Daniel K. Williams in Christianity Today, his sympathies are clearly with America’s marginalized, and the “revivalists” in his account “appear to be agents of oppression.” Because his focus is on the intersection of Christianity and political power, he also says little about the particulars of American Christian teachings and how they’ve impacted people on an individual basis. Still, Chosen Land is the first book since Sydney Ahlstrom’s 1,100-page A Religious History of the American People, published in 1972, to attempt such a comprehensive survey. Sutton’s “superbly written” work manages to cover “an enormously wide range of material” in half as many pages. Better yet, it’s so full of colorful story-telling that it’s “the type of popular work you can read on a plane or a bus.”

‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’ by Liza Minnelli

“There are a lot of extravagant emotions in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. That’s to be expected from Liza Minnelli, daughter of the gifted but deeply troubled Judy Garland. Minnelli became a star in her own right before she reached her 20s and embarked on a string of addictions, affairs, and marriages. But in her new memoir, she’s most compelling when writing about her early adolescence, when she was policing her mother’s addictions while feeding her pills to keep her functioning. Once Minnelli frees herself at 16, “the book devolves into a standard, frequently repetitive blend of triumph and trial,” and while Minnelli is admirably candid about her own addictions, it’s “a bit Liza with a zzzzz.”

To me, Minnelli’s memoir is “surprisingly cohesive and spry,” said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. Importantly, “it captures Minnelli’s voice, which combines showbiz luvviness with winning vitality.” Recounting her quick rise to screen, stage, and recording stardom, she “gleefully” labels herself “the original nepo baby,” conceding the edge she had as the daughter of Garland and the great screen director Vincente Minnelli. Liza “revels” in her career highs, including her four Tonys and her Oscar for 1972’s Cabaret. And though she also eventually details passing out drunk on a New York City sidewalk, “the most eyebrow-raising material concerns her tumultuous love life.” She calls her fourth husband “a pasty-faced jerk” and refuses to apologize for her youthful cheating, when the lovers she juggled included Peter Sellers, Martin Scorsese, Desi Arnaz Jr., and her first two husbands.

“I’m not sure the story I absorbed is the story Liza wanted to tell,” said Sam Wasson in Air Mail. “Or maybe I got it perfectly”: that since suffering maternal neglect, she has been constantly running from herself. “Is it all those lost decades of drink and drugs that account for the Wikipedia-like blandness of her memories?” That could be, though it’s also possible that when she describes her mother dying at 47 from an overdose and attributes the death to Garland’s having “let her guard down,” she’s provided us a different clue. “Suffice to say, Liza is not about to repeat her mother’s mistake.”

A leading publisher has cancelled the US publication of a horror novel after claims that generative AI was used in its writing.

In what “appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of AI use”, Hachette has blocked the US publication of “Shy Girl” and its UK edition has been discontinued, said The New York Times.

The “stunning fact” that the book got this far shows how AI is “seeping into even traditionally published fiction” and “how unprepared many in the book world are” for the “dawn of an uncertain new era”.

‘Gaps in logic’

“Shy Girl” was originally self-published in February 2025, before being published in the UK in November. It was all set for a US release until The New York Times published claims of AI use.

Max Spero, founder of AI detection programme Pangram, ran a test that suggested 78% of the text was AI generated. The paper’s own analysis using several detection tools found “recurring patterns characteristic of AI generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an over-reliance on the rule of three”.

Author Mia Ballard denies that she used AI and insists that an editor was responsible for the passages under scrutiny. “My name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she told The New York Times, while Hachette said it “remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling”.

‘The plagiarism machine’

Everyone in publishing “knew a scandal like this would hit sooner or later” and “every editor I know has been crossing their fingers” that it wouldn’t be them, said author Lincoln Michel on his Counter Craft Substack. “More than a few” published books have been “partially or entirely written” by AI, but this fact has been “disclosed” and they used the technology in “thoughtful, artistic ways”.

The “layers of vetting and editing” used by traditional publishers are supposed to guarantee “a certain level of quality control” and “trust”, so they “may need to be a lot more careful now”. The episode may also make life harder for “emerging authors” because the “gatekeepers” of the industry will “have no choice but to figure out a way to drastically filter the flood” of AI, which might mean “leaning even more on connections” with established writers.

This “will not be the last time we see crap like this happen”, said Kayleigh Donaldson on political blog Pajiba. “More and more ‘authors’ will be exposed as users of the plagiarism machine”, but once a “big name writer” admits it there will be “no pushback” because they “make too much money”. Instead, there will be “smarmy think-pieces claiming that people are just jealous of AI and actually it’s sooo much better at writing than you are”.

Spring is one of the year’s stacked seasons for cookbooks. In 2026, new releases include an homage to a single beloved ingredient, Southern cooking by way of both Emancipation and China, and a regional exploration of Lebanese food. Get excited, get curious, and just get cooking.

‘The Butter Book’

Butter is on the brain here, so much so that this slim tome from Anna Stockwell is even shaped like a stick of golden glory. “Part historical deep dive, part recipe book, part decorative object,” the book does it all, said Vogue. Open it, and you are greeted with a history of butter, plus simple ways to use it to elevate everyday dishes. Your pot of rice will thank you. More complicated recipes appear too, including fancified buttered pasta and butter roast chicken. (out now, $19.95, Chronicle Books, Amazon)

‘Down South + East: A Chinese American Cookbook’

This book “so seamlessly blends Chinese cuisine with classic Southern dishes that they seem almost destined to be paired together,” said The Kitchn. In truth, chef-author Ron Hsu, of Atlanta’s Lazy Betty, stretches the influences across multiple parts of East Asia. Banana pudding wafts with the green vanilla notes of pandan. Soy sauce, Maggi seasoning, daikon and shiitake mushrooms bring the pot roast into new territory. Batons of Chinese eggplant are coated in cornmeal before frying. Romaine is braised, as is common in Hong Kong, but with ham hock potlikker. You get the idea. (out now, $40, Abrams, Amazon)

‘A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior’

Crystal Wahpepah, the chef of Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, California, is an enrolled member of the Kickapoo tribe. With “A Feather and a Fork,” she uses her recipes to tell the story of her displaced family, who were moved from Oklahoma to the San Francisco Bay Area, and to “decolonize nutrition and reclaim sovereignty” over “traditional foodways,” Wahpepah said in her book. Lessons come true and fast in recipes for amaranth salad, wild onion soup and chokecherry pudding. (out now, $35, Rodale, Amazon)

‘Hello, Home Cooking: Do-Able Dishes for Every Day’

Ham El-Waylly’s debut is a “lively book that blends solid technique with a touch of whimsy,” said Library Journal. The chef of the New Orleans-influenced New York City restaurant Strange Delight, El-Waylly brings his fine-dining background and expansive, diverse home cooking skills to vivid life. With El-Waylly’s Bolivian mother, Egyptian father and childhood in Qatar, his recipes string these influences into a very inspired American way of eating. (out now, $35, Clarkson Potter, Amazon)

‘Lebanon: Cooking the Foods of My Homeland’

Anissa Helou, a food-writing legend, was born in Lebanon and focused her first book, “Lebanese Cuisine,” on the dishes her mother cooked. This new publication reaches across the nation to showcase a variety of regional dishes. Helou “came to look at the food of my own country afresh, realizing that it’s far more fascinating to view a cuisine through a regional rather than a national lens,” she said in the book’s introduction. (out now, $40, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘Party Tricks: Easy, Elegant Recipes for Snacking and Hosting’

Let us be extremely real: Everyone needs at least two handfuls of party tricks. With Anna Hezel’s new book, you will be the indebted recipient of a bookful. She recommends votives instead of candles to prevent flammable accidents, premade snacks set in various parts of the space for easy access, and a variety of corkscrews plopped within reach — “that way, no one has to search when they are ready to open another bottle,” Hezel said to MarthaStewart.com. Of course, “Party Tricks” is loaded with knockout dishes and how to make them, including cured ham with hazelnuts warmed in butter, maple butter togarashi popcorn, and whipped feta with burnt honey. (out now, $24.95, Chronicle Books, Amazon)

‘La Copine: New California Cooking from an Oasis in the Desert’

Joshua Tree National Park, in southeastern California, is a desert stunner. Smaller by far and equally jaw-dropping is La Copine, a sliver of a restaurant in nearby Yucca Valley. The co-owners and couple, Nikki Hill and Claire Wadsworth, have “built what’s become a joyful queer oasis in the high desert,” said Olivia Tarantino at Bon Appétit. That assessment is sound. Open Thursday to Sunday during the day, La Copine is a respite after a long hike or a long night of carousing. The pair’s book, with its mix of hearty and feathery cooking, transports. (April 28, $45, Abrams, Amazon)

‘The Taste of Country Cooking’

It’s the “most beloved Southern cookbook of all time,” said the press materials for this 50th anniversary edition of Edna Lewis’ 1976 classic. There’s not a lick of exaggeration in that statement. Lewis taught Americans not steeped in the traditions of Black Virginian cooking how to prepare green tomato preserves, pan-fried chicken and her style of biscuits. Those in the know have long cherished their copies of “The Taste of Country Cooking.” Now a new generation can cradle their own. (May 5, $40, Knopf, Amazon)

‘Ammazza!: Culinary Adventures from New York to Italy and Back Again’

Hillary Sterling is currently known for the monster-hit Italian restaurant Ci Siamo in New York City. It’s a destination that’s both sophisticated and comforting. “Ammazza!,” Sterling’s debut cookbook, promises a similar endgame. There are recipes for her beloved Ci Siamo dishes, like the braised beans with oil-cured olives and fried sage and rosemary leaves. But Sterling’s resume is long, so her Italian way with Passover is here, as well, and her Mexican take on Thanksgiving, because “​​so many of our team members come from Puebla or other parts of Mexico. And because Mexican food is my second love after Italian,” said Sterling to Total Food Service magazine. (May 12, $40, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

The leader of the Liberal Democrats picks books that explore human experience and interpersonal relationships. He will be talking about his own book, “Why I Care: and why care matters”, at the Oxford Literary Festival on Friday 27 March.

Middlemarch

George Eliot, 1871

Reading “Middlemarch” shifted my perspective on what it means to be “good”. Eliot shows that being a kind person isn’t about grand gestures. Instead, she writes about the importance of small, simple, everyday actions to remind the reader that they have the greatest impact on others.

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan, 1997

This was a humdinger. By turning a freak ballooning accident into a nightmare stalking situation, McEwan left me reflecting on the fragility of relationships and the unpredictability of the human mind.

Waterland

Graham Swift, 1983

This novel tells the story of two East Anglian families divided by class but connected by a dark secret. As a history lover, this was right up my alley. Swift shows how we are shaped by our past and can never truly escape where we come from.

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Elif Shafak, 2024

I loved the concept of following a single drop of water across centuries and cultures. It’s a beautiful way to reflect on our shared humanity and personalise the vastness of history.

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco, 1980

Set in a 14th-century Italian monastery, this is a wonderfully complex murder mystery. Eco challenges the reader to become a kind of detective, and leaves you questioning the nature of truth itself. The suspense feels dangerous and exciting.

Wild Swans

Jung Chang, 1991

This one is a total emotional roller-coaster that stays with you long after the final page. Chang takes the reader through a heart-breaking story of survival, focusing on three women. The sheer grit and strength of human spirit in this book is incredibly moving and gave me a new perspective on everyday challenges.

‘Love’s Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love’ by Stephen Grosz

Though Stephen Grosz’s first book was a critically acclaimed best seller in the U.K., said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times, his second “carries more of a depth charge.” Once again, the American-born, London-based psychoanalyst unfurls a series of case studies from his practice with the skill of a short-story writer. But because his subject this time is love, the new case studies add up to “a surpassingly wise investigation of the ways in which we trip ourselves up in the pursuit of our heart’s desires.” Grosz’s central insight about love is that our difficulties with sustaining it arise from each individual’s prior experiences of loss: If you’re not at peace with the losses you’ve endured, including the simple loss of childhood, you may never cease repeating the adolescent habit of heaping too many expectations on love. But reaching full self-understanding takes time, often years. Grosz’s “illuminating” narratives make every search compelling.

In each story, “Grosz is the psychoanalyst-cum-detective, listening for clues until the unconscious forces that are driving his patients’ behavior are made visible,” said Kathy O’Shaughnessy in the Financial Times. One patient who claims to love her fiancé can’t bring herself to mail the couple’s wedding invitations. A married man obsesses over his wife’s underwear because he prefers inconclusive evidence that she’s cheating to strong evidence that might rule out that possibility. Grosz openly admits that he hasn’t always been right in his initial diagnosis of the root of these patients’ hang-ups. But Grosz’s work is all about peeling through layers and seeking to continually see each person’s story anew. Love’s Labor is “categorically not a self-help book.” Instead, it’s “a compressed, brilliant distillation of 40 years of clinical experience and deep thought, written to last.”

“The title refers to Grosz’s belief that the work of love is to learn to see oneself and others clearly,” said Sophie McBain in The Guardian. Of course, that’s “also the work of psychoanalysis and, arguably, of life.” In one of his stories, two of his female friends who are fellow psychoanalysts have a falling-out because one is sleeping with the other’s husband, and the heart of the conflict appears to stem from the women’s differing views of the purpose of both psychoanalysis and life. Grosz aims merely to listen long and well and constructively enough to help his patients gain deeper self-knowledge. “What a privilege it must be to accompany another person so closely as they try to figure out the challenge of living—of change and love, and accepting love and change. And what a privilege it is for the reader to catch a glimpse of this process.”

‘Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird’ by Keith O’Brien

“More than three decades after his final game, Larry Bird retains a mythopoeic quality,” said Jack McCallum in The Wall Street Journal. The small-town Indiana native was, as early as age 20, basketball’s Great White Hope, and because he happened into a lasting rivalry with the charismatic Magic Johnson, he delivered on that promise, his on-court brilliance helping turn March Madness into a television phenomenon and righting the then-floundering NBA. But as Keith O’Brien’s new book reminds us, Bird’s breakthrough was far from guaranteed. At 20, the future Hall of Famer was also already a divorced college dropout and former garbage collector with a daughter to support. His father had recently died by suicide. Heartland “goes deep” to tell the full, gripping story.

Bird’s story “could have ended before it ever really began,” said Noral Parham in the Indianapolis Recorder. Though he’d been a high school star, young Larry quit Indiana University weeks after joining the school’s powerhouse program because he felt out of place. Fortunately, two coaches at underdog Indiana State didn’t give up on him, and Bird spent the next three seasons helping lift the Sycamores out of obscurity and into a national title showdown with Johnson’s Michigan State that was viewed by 50 million people—still the most ever for a college game. Indiana State was a team built from scraps and one world-class talent from tiny French Lick, said Peter Robert Casey in Slam magazine. O’Brien, though he was unable to secure Bird’s cooperation, “drops you into that world, and the community around Bird, to show just how
unlikely this whole thing really was.”

O’Brien, whose last book was a best seller about Pete Rose, has now written “the definitive chronicle of the Sycamores’ run over the three years that Bird captained the team,” said Edward Banchs in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Of course he learned nothing directly from Bird, who remained press shy throughout his NBA career and subsequent two decades as an NBA coach and team executive. But because O’Brien brings the journey alive, “I found myself cheering for Bird even though I knew how the story ultimately shaped out.”

In 1971, at a party at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, his “friend and protégé” George Lucas wandered upstairs, hoping to catch a few minutes of a new TV movie, said Graham Daseler in Literary Review. It was “Duel” by Steven Spielberg – then a “gawky 24-year-old” whom Lucas had met a few times. Riveted, he watched till the end, at one point rushing downstairs to tell his indifferent host: “This guy’s really good.”

Paul Fischer’s “superb” book tells the story of how, over the next decade, these three directors – Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg – went from “obscurity to cinematic immortality” and “remade the movie industry” in the process, while also becoming close friends.

Coppola was the first to achieve stardom when “The Godfather” (1972) raked in $250 million, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time. Three years later, Spielberg “took the title” with “Jaws”, which “earned a cool $458 million”. And then in 1977, Lucas topped both with “Star Wars” – a film so successful that “even on slow days”, it banked upwards of $1.2 million.

“The most richly ironic aspect” of Fischer’s book is that these massive hits were all expected to flop, said Ty Burr in The Wall Street Journal. A “profound disconnect” then existed between what “old-guard Hollywood thought audiences wanted” and what they actually did.

Forced to make things “up as they went along”, the trio behaved badly at times: “friendships were betrayed, bankruptcies filed, and the women in their world – be they collaborators or partners – got the short end of the stick from the boys’ club”.

This isn’t exactly a new story, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But Fischer presents it “with the enthusiasm and commitment of a true fan” – and the result is a “really readable, closely researched account of life at Hollywood’s top table”.

‘A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness’ by Michael Pollan

“Michael Pollan is upfront about what his latest book won’t do,” said Tiffany Ap in Bloomberg. A World Appears “doesn’t settle the age-old debate between those who believe subjective experience can be reduced to the electrochemical chatter of neurons and those who suspect something more ineffable is at work.” Even for the best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, the mystery of the subject is too difficult to crack. By his count, there are currently 106 competing theories of consciousness. Instead of using his book to make a case for any one of them, he takes us along on a quest for understanding that “pushes the reader to become more conscious”—more aware that it’s miraculous both that “a world appears” every time we wake from sleep and that no one yet has fully explained how or why.

“A good chunk of A World Appears is devoted to a useful elucidation of the differences between sentience, feelings, thought, and the self,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Like humans, Pollan reminds us, plants have sentience, in that they sense the particulars of their surroundings and can respond accordingly. Moving on, he defines feelings as physical processes that produce mental experiences and defines thought as all the content that streams through our minds during our waking hours. As in his previous books, Pollan employs a travelogue approach to exploring these topics, conversing with a bevy of experts, including neuroscientists, philosophers, and artists of various kinds. Unfortunately, his chosen current subject “does not lend itself to this kind of journalism.” The nature of consciousness is just too elusive, and when he turns to the question of whether the self is an illusion, “things get especially vaporous.” We’ve taken a journey—“one that effectively leaves us right where we started.”

Other books have delivered “more lucid and arresting introductions to this subject,” said Charles Finch in The Atlantic. Still, “Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact.” As he proved with his explorations of human nutrition and the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, he possesses an “uncanny” ability to “scent the direction in which the culture is headed.” That talent shines through when this book pushes back against the notion that AI is anywhere close to replicating consciousness. Though Pollan hesitates to claim that a fundamental aspect of human capability and human experience remains beyond science’s reach, A World Appears closely maps out such a territory. By doing so, it “steals back some of the sensation of miraculousness that this era has largely outsourced to technology.”

‘On Morrison’ by Namwali Serpell

Toni Morrison is easily misjudged, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. Though the 1993 Nobel laureate is routinely celebrated for centering the experiences of Black women in her novels, her “true genius” was as a stylist. Critic and fellow novelist Namwali Serpell apparently feels the same way, because her new book seeks to shift readers’ focus from Morrison’s sociological significance to her artistic achievements. As Serpell pores over Morrison’s body of work, she highlights how Morrison put herself in conversation with prior writers, including by adopting and furthering the evasions and fragmented perspectives of William Faulkner’s fiction. The effort pulls Morrison out of “sanctified solitude” and “into the busy fold of canonized American writers, whose difficult books demand to be debated and compared, and, most of all, to be reread.”

“I have waited years for this book,” said Laila Lalami in The Guardian. As Serpell notes in her introduction, one of the reasons Morrison’s novels are more often read in African American Studies classes than in Comp Lit is because they are difficult to read and difficult to teach. But Serpell “does Morrison the respect of reading her seriously,” probing her narrative strategies and her language choices, admiring the novels that deserve admiration and criticizing Morrison’s lesser writing, such as her poetry. As a result, On Morrison “works on many levels: as a study of craft, as a critical appraisal, and as a tribute to an artist who was difficult in all the right ways.”

As Serpell argues and wrestles with Morrison, “she might be having the time of her life,” said Wesley Morris in The New York Times. Whether she’s spotlighting the comedy in Song of Solomon or the names in Sula or the significance of numbers in Paradise, “Serpell’s excitement, her sense of discovery and dismay, become yours.” Familiar texts suddenly feel new again, and Serpell’s “ingenious connections—of Morrison to Nabokov, to Ellison, to Disney, to the ancient Greeks—inspire you to do your own connecting.” Even when Serpell expresses disappointments, she “cuts because she cares.” You finish the book thrilled that Morrison (1931–2019) isn’t just a cultural icon. Even under sharp scrutiny, “St. Toni holds up.”

‘Andrew Tate doesn’t get the point of books’

Joel Halldorf at The Atlantic

“Digitization” is the “latest innovation in reading,” but while the “gains in information are undeniable, the costs to attention, contemplation and reflection are no less profound,” says Joel Halldorf. Digital pages are “cluttered with distractions” and “embedded links invite readers to move on mid-sentence.” The “erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas,” which “reshapes the public square, allowing brief snippets of emotionally charged content to crowd out nuance, and algorithms to reinforce preferences and prejudices.”

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‘Trump’s bragging about the economy doesn’t match reality — and Americans notice’

Philip Bump at MS Now

Fox News “released new polling last week that showed Americans broadly remain skeptical of Trump’s leadership as president,” says Philip Bump. “That includes his handling of what was once his strongest issue: the economy.” Now, “only 33% of Americans approve of his handling of the cost of living.” This has “been a lingering problem for Trump”: His “administration’s insistence” that “‘affordability’ is an invented issue or that an economic boom is imminent simply doesn’t match Americans’ actual experience.”

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‘Don’t trust this $4 solution for getting a prescription’

Joseph V. Sakran and Rahul Gorijavolu at The Washington Post

In Utah, an “artificial intelligence platform called Doctronic is renewing prescription medications for patients without physician involvement,” say Joseph V. Sakran and Rahul Gorijavolu. If “AI can handle” medication renewals for “stable chronic conditions,” it “could free up doctors.” But the kind of “chronic conditions” in question “evolve silently. Blood pressure medications become insufficient; diabetes medications require adjustment.” Safety concerns “have been broadly expressed,” and the “window to act” is now — “before autonomous AI prescribing expands.”

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‘Carney confirms: When Washington whistles, Ottawa salutes.’

Andrew Mitrovica at Al Jazeera

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney once “spoke about restraint,” says Andrew Mitrovica. “He urged the world’s most powerful governments to resist the easy seduction of reckless escalation.” But “Carney has backed” the war on Iran, which “bears all the blatant trademarks of the impulsive thinking Carney claimed to mistrust.” Perhaps the “calculation in Ottawa is that loyalty today will purchase goodwill tomorrow.” That “reflects a remarkable misreading of United States President Donald Trump’s brass-knuckled political instincts.”

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‘Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln’ by Matthew Pinsker

When he was elected president in 1860, “Abraham Lincoln was not the inexperienced politician that history and myth have suggested,” said Caroline E. Janney in The Washington Post. In Matthew Pinsker’s compelling new book, America’s 16th president comes across as a man who dedicated most of his working life to political-party-building. Though he’d held no elected office since 1849, when he’d kept his promise to leave Congress after a single term, Lincoln never ceased networking, exercised power throughout the intervening decade as a lawyer and lobbyist, and by 1853, when a town was named after him, was the most prominent Whig in Illinois. Whigs were outnumbered, however, and the party was soon torn apart by the issue of slavery. By 1856, Lincoln was pouring his energy into the Republican cause, and when the new party tapped him as their standard bearer, “no one should have been surprised.”

“Pinsker drives homes what a mover and shaker Lincoln was,” said Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times. “A driven, scheming political animal,” he deluged constituents with promotional material, glad-handed both allies and foes, and at times used deceit and manipulation to manage party factions. “We’re reminded the past isn’t a playpen: They weren’t handing out presidencies to whatever Bible-quoting yahoo showed up and asked.” And while Pinsker can go too deep into the weeds, spending 20 pages on Lincoln’s failed 1849 effort to secure a sub-Cabinet federal post, “Boss Lincoln is history at its most fresh, real, and relevant,” showing us that even the great unifiers of bygone times had to scrap to push this country in the right direction.

“It is hard to imagine that the year will bring forth a Lincoln book of more originality or consequence,” said Harold Holzer in The Wall Street Journal. “Boss Lincoln is Team of Rivals on steroids,” focusing far more intently than Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 best seller did on the long game Lincoln played to achieve goals he cared more about than his own career. First his passion was infrastructure building, including railroads; later it was preventing the spread of slavery. Lincoln understood that those goals couldn’t be achieved without gathering power, and Pinsker’s “deep research, interpretive daring, and fine writing advance the case with panache.” Given that even the Gettysburg Address is analyzed here primarily for its political impact, “perhaps Pinsker grants Lincoln too little credit for inspiring voters with his soaring oratory.” Still, his book “fills a gap in the literature” and should inspire “lively discussion” among historians for years to come.

‘A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides’ by Gisèle Pelicot

“A harrowing read,” Gisèle Pelicot’s searing new memoir is also “an unexpected testimony to the tricky nature of attachment,” said Helen Schulman in Air Mail. In 2020, the 67-year-old French retiree had been happily married for nearly 50 years when she was informed by police that her husband, Dominique, had over the past decade repeatedly drugged her into unconsciousness, raped her, and videotaped scores of other men raping her as well. She was devastated, of course. Yet in the early weeks and months that led to her husband’s globally watched trial, she didn’t instantly cast aside all happy memories of the life she’d shared with her abuser. A Hymn to Life thus “tells the story of how a woman held two opposing truths in her head in order to piece her shattered life back together.”

“I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that A Hymn to Life is unique,” said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Over four years, after all, Pelicot transformed herself from stunned victim to “a national, if not global, icon,” finding the courage to reveal her own name so that the criminal trial of Dominique and 50 other men would be extremely public. “Shame has to change sides,” as her book’s subtitle declares. To get to that point, she had to overcome her own shame about having suspected nothing and thus looking like an idiot. She also had to move past a deep-seated sense that, despite being a mother and a grandmother and having been the couple’s main breadwinner, being married was the primary source of her value.

“Pelicot’s honesty is breathtaking,” said Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic, “and it helps make A Hymn to Life all the more revelatory as a sociological document.” Her adult children were repulsed by and furious with their father as soon as his secrets emerged, but we can see that Pelicot’s love had blinded her and was too important for her to judge it empty. If she had since renounced all men, “that would be perfectly understandable,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Instead, at 73, she has moved in with a new boyfriend. “Love is not dead,” she writes.

With 2026 declared the National Year of Reading, book lovers can look forward to an exciting range of new releases across all genres. High-profile novels from the likes of Julian Barnes, Ali Smith and Maggie O’Farrell sit alongside gripping debut works from emerging and the latest by established authors, exploring topics as varied as myth, dystopian drama, dark romance and edge-of-your-seat thrillers.

Glyph by Ali Smith

Billed as a companion novel to “Gliff”, Ali Smith’s 2024 bestseller set in a dystopian near future, “Glyph” examines the fractures in the present world through the lens of grief. Estranged sisters Petra and Patricia are drawn together by the death of their mother. The book’s “primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language”, said Keiran Goddard in The Guardian. Smith raises “ethically substantive questions” about how the war dead are represented, touching on stories from the world wars and the Gaza conflict. Smith “can bring any sentence alive with the verve of her wordplay”, said Lara Feigel in The New Statesman. “Her characters spark off one another in speech, echoing, patterning and discovering the energy contained in a single moment.”
Out now

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

Inspired by her Irish heritage, Maggie O’Farrell’s “Land” is set in the mid-19th century in the aftermath of the Great Famine. The novel follows a father employed by Ordnance Survey to map the whole of Ireland. His relationship with his young son is profoundly altered by an unexpected encounter that derails his work and his sense of purpose. It “moves from a storm-lashed Irish peninsula to Canada and India, tracing a multigenerational story of separation and reunion, colonisation and resistance, loyalty and survival”, said Julieanne Corr in The Sunday Times. There’s also a “‘particularly loyal dog’ and a ghost whose presence lingers”. After the success of O’Farrell’s “Hamnet”, the screen rights have already been snapped up.
Due out 2 June

John of John by Douglas Stuart

Known for his poignant prose, Douglas Stuart turns his attention to a fraught family reunion set against the stark beauty of the Hebridean landscape. In “John of John”, a community shaped by tradition and the weight of expectation forms the backdrop to the story of a “troubled father-son bond”, said Daisy Lester in The Independent. After “Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo”, the Booker Prize-winning author’s third novel is “sure to be a defining title in 2026”. Exploring his “well-trodden themes of masculinity, coming of age and working-class life in a Scottish setting”, this is “Stuart at his very best”.
Due out 5 May

Vigil by George Saunders

An unrepentant oil tycoon is visited on his deathbed by angels, but will he atone for a lifetime of wrongdoing? In his latest novel, George Saunders revisits his signature blend of dry-witted spirituality and thought-provoking philosophy, building on the irreverent tone of his debut novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo”, which explored Abraham Lincoln’s grief following the death of his son. In “Vigil”, Saunders “returns to that indeterminate space between life and death, comedy and grief, moral inquiry and narrative hijinks”, said Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. The narrator and leading angel, Jill Blaine, is a “spectral death doula” who must confront her own memories of love and loss. “This is where Saunders’s ghosts do their most persuasive work, not as blunt moral instruments, but as unfinished souls.”
Out now

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

“Elizabeth Strout is as prolific as they come,” said Julia Hass on Literary Hub, and “she’s back with a new, poignant, emotional look at relationships, conversation, and feeling less alone in the world”. Set in modern-day Massachusetts, “The Things We Never Say” follows Artie Dam, a high school history teacher whose seemingly pedestrian life is marked by a quiet sense of isolation and confusion. His feelings intensify when he uncovers a secret about his own past. “Strout is consistent and satisfying: her writing is safe, trustworthy, and always delightful, and illuminates the world in new, brighter colours with every book she writes.”
Due out 7 May

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

“Departure(s)” blends memoir, fiction and philosophical reflection, infused with Julian Barnes’ trademark self-deprecation and uncomfortable truths, as he becomes the unwitting matchmaker in the reunion of two old university friends. It’s often difficult to tell where fact ends and imagination begins; whether in the romantic storyline or in Barnes’ own reflections on mortality, since he was diagnosed with a rare but manageable form of blood cancer in 2020. This charming blurring of lines is at the heart of the story, said Dinah Birch in the Times Literary Supplement. “Barnes muses on the unreliable functions of memory, the construction of the self, the limits of autonomy… These disparate elements are bound together by the skilful management of theme and tone.”
Out now

What am I, a Deer? by Polly Barton

Polly Barton’s name is generating a buzz across literary websites. Not only has she translated “Hooked”, the newly published and highly anticipated follow-up to “Butter” by Japanese author Asako Yuzuki, but she has also just released her own debut novel, “What Am I, a Deer?” The book follows a young woman who moves to Frankfurt hoping to reset her life, only to become consumed by an obsession with a stranger and a new-found love of karaoke. “Barton’s masterful use of language makes for a sharp, mind-racing literary debut,” said Sofia de la Cruz at Wallpaper*. “The story unfolds through a witty, explosive stream of consciousness.”
Out 26 March

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It has been an unbearable winter in some pockets of the country, with people ready for spring. Along with somewhat warmer weather, this March some highly anticipated book releases are arriving to brighten your day. They include a collection of award-winning science fiction stories and Ibram X. Kendi’s latest meditation on racial politics.

‘Now I Surrender’ by Álvaro Enrigue

Described as “part epic, part alt-Western,” Enrigue’s latest novel reimagines a 19th-century war between the Apaches, Mexico and the United States. The conflict begins with the abduction of a young Mexican woman by the tribe.

Most of the story focuses on Geronimo, the Apache leader, and the title refers to his final surrender to U.S. forces in 1886. Enrigue’s approach to the story “isn’t so much to lament the end of Apachería” as it is to “admire the steeliness of a tribe that survived centuries-long attempts to subdue it,” said Kirkus Reviews. “A curious but effective treatment of an underappreciated effort to resist imperialism.” (March 3, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Whidbey: A Novel’ by T Kira Madden

Seven years after the release of her memoir, “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls,” T Kira Madden’s debut novel has arrived. It’s a “tense, atmospheric thriller” set on an island near Seattle, said Esquire.

When a predator is murdered, his mother and two of his victims must “reckon with the ensuing secrets, confusion and darkness.” A woman running from the man who abused her as a child has a chance meeting with a stranger who promises to kill the stranger — all days before the abuser is murdered. In Madden’s hands, the novel is “so much more than a noir story,” said Electric Literature. The book “gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and rape, claiming power not only from assailants” but from a “broken justice system and the media.” (March 10, $24, Harper Collins, Amazon)

‘Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age’ by Ibram X. Kendi

Author of “Stamped from the Beginning” and “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi is back with another book about the “state of Western bigotry,” said The New York Times. This time, he focuses on the “great replacement theory,” the concept of an “elite conspiracy to nudge white people in Europe and the United States off the map” by encouraging “low birthrates and promoting an influx of Black and brown immigrants.” Kendi argues that the theory “animates much of our politics today” while tracing its evolution from the “tirades of a French novelist to halls of power in Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Donald Trump’s America.” (March 17, $35, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Seasons of Glass & Iron: Stories’ by Amal El-Mohtar

The acclaimed science fiction writer presents a collection of previously published short stories and poetry. The book includes the eponymous Nebula and Hugo Award-winning fantasy short story, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” which is a feminist retelling of two fairy tales.

The book features a variety of formats, such as letters, diary entries and folktales and blends “fantasy, magical realism and speculative fiction,” rooted in “history, myth or legend,” said Publishers Weekly. The tales range across time and place but are connected by El-Mohtar’s love of women. The poetry, presented in both English and Arabic, “delves into real-world struggles while still showcasing El-Mohtar’s characteristic lyricism and striking imagery.” (March 24, $25, Macmillan, Amazon)

‘Son of Nobody: A Novel’ by Yann Martel

The Canadian author of the international bestseller “Life of Pi” is back with his sixth novel. It follows an Oxford scholar’s interpretation of an ancient Greek epic poem called “The Psoad,” which tells the story of the Trojan War from the point of view of a common soldier.

Parallel to this “imagined Greek text” is the scholar’s footnoted commentary, “part faux academic and part plain-spoken,” said Kirkus Reviews. The story is a “powerful meditation on life, death and the vanity of human wishes, all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud.” (March 31, $30, W.W. Norton & Company, Amazon)

‘The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema’ by Paul Fischer

“Paul Fischer’s compulsively readable account of how Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg changed the world of moviemaking isn’t just a group biography,” said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe. “It’s also a collage of art, commerce, and ego, set against what became a new age of Hollywood blockbusters—an age that this trio did much to create.” As the 1960s turned to the ’70s, the trio were little more than “brazenly confident” kids eager to make their own movies, with the older Coppola having a slight head start. By 1971, the three were friends and allies. By 1977, they had found paths within a changing industry to making three market-altering hits: The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars. Fischer’s story of how each got there raises a question that matters in any such field: “What does it mean to sell out?”

“Fischer shrewdly analyzes his trio’s individual temperaments,” said Wendy Smith in The Washington Post. In 1969, the manic dreamer Coppola partnered with the loner Lucas to create American Zoetrope, a production company that was supposed to break free of cinematic norms. Lucas shared Coppola’s dream of escaping Hollywood’s restraints, but he was prioritizing money when he pushed Coppola to say yes to directing The Godfather. Meanwhile, his love of comic books and old movie serials made him a more natural partner with Spielberg, with whom he eventually co-created the Indiana Jones franchise. Lucas’ priorities changed after he made Star Wars. Fischer depicts him as becoming the kind of profit-focused producer he once despised. Coppola, in turn, is depicted as erratic and self-indulgent. Yet “there are no simple people in The Last Kings of Hollywood,” Fischer’s “smart, juicy” account of a transitional moment in American filmmaking.

“At times, one wishes for more characters,” said Alexander Larman in The Spectator (U.K.). Some of the larger-than-life figures of the era, including Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, are “relegated to entertaining walk-on appearances.” But by focusing on Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg as a trio, Fischer “derives a fresh idea from a period that has already been exhaustively studied,” said Michael O’Donnell in The Atlantic. Instead of showing us that lone visionaries can sometimes triumph, Fischer’s account “demonstrates the evergreen value of collaboration.” Though at times the three “fought bitterly,” they made up easily, provided one another with financial support and constructive criticism, and inspired one another to make better films. The title of Fischer’s book suggests that American moviemaking will never have another era as rich as these three knew. But today’s ambitious young filmmakers should read the book differently. “Perhaps the artistic fraternity of the ’70s is not a relic but a model.”

‘The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief’ by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes “specializes in seeing familiar figures from a new slant,” said Suzi Feay in the Financial Times. In his new book, the British biographer blows the dust off Alfred, Lord Tennyson, helping us see Queen Victoria’s favorite poet as “a dashing, compelling, mysteriously conflicted figure.” Tennyson, after all, didn’t reach national-treasure status, or have the money to marry, until past 40. Before then, he struggled not just to make a living but also to cope with the scientific discoveries of the era that upended prevailing beliefs in humanity’s centrality in the universe.

Until his 1850 artistic breakthrough, Tennyson “seemed doomed to loneliness, doubt, and willful eccentricity,” said Catherine Nicholson in The New York Times. Born in 1809 as the third child of 11, Britain’s future poet laureate was raised by a brutal and unstable clergyman father. Tennyson escaped by attending Cambridge, where he found his first true friend in the dashing Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly at 22 on a trip abroad. Immediately, Tennyson began writing elegies to his friend, which grew across nearly 20 years into In Memoriam, the 133-poem collection that won the poet his fame. By focusing on the man who wrote that work, The Boundless Deep “invites us to appreciate the remarkable fruits of his protracted estrangement.”

Unfortunately, the book’s Tennyson “remains an elusive figure,” said Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker. And Holmes is “almost mute on an obvious question: Was Tennyson in love with Arthur Hallam?” While it’s “lovely” to read Holmes’ commentaries on Tennyson’s verse, he seems too fixated on the poet’s deep engagement with the era’s science and with the implications of such discoveries as Earth’s relative insignificance, the planet’s vast age, and the rise and extinction of its dinosaurs. Still, Holmes writes about the resulting crisis of faith “with such sympathy that even his most secular-minded modern readers feel the shock of finding oneself alone and unloved in a godforsaken universe,” said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. And when Holmes loves a poem, “he writes about it with a wonderful capacity for noticing every pulse of meter, every flicker of nuance.”

For years, mass-market paperbacks have been credited with making books more accessible and affordable. The wee books could be found in places most people shop, like grocery stores, and were even partially responsible for the popularity of some authors, including horror icon Stephen King. However, a decline in sales and shifts toward other, more expensive books have led to what may be the end of the pocket-sized format.

Readers ‘leading the move away from mass markets’

After nearly a century in wide circulation, mass-market paperbacks are “shuffling toward extinction,” said The New York Times. Sales have dropped over the years, “peeled away by e-books, digital audiobooks and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks,” the mass market’s “larger and pricier cousin.”

Last year, ReaderLink, the country’s largest distributor of books to airports, pharmacies and big-box stores, announced that it would no longer carry mass markets. The books can still be found in some places, but “as a format, I would say it’s pretty much over,” Ivan Held, the president of publishing imprints Putnam, Dutton and Berkley, said to the Times.

Since the 1930s, mass-market paperbacks have been “beloved for making reading accessible,” said Smithsonian Magazine. Typically printed on cheaper paper and measuring “roughly four by seven inches,” they were “marketed wherever people shopped, filling racks in grocery aisles, drugstores, gas stations, newsstands and malls.”

Mass market unit sales “plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%,” according to Circana BookScan, and sales through October 2025 were about 15 million units, said Publishers Weekly.

It wasn’t publishers “leading the move away from mass markets,” said the Times. “It was readers.” Mass markets were not just “cannibalized digitally.” Readers appear “more willing to buy books in larger, pricier formats.” Romance readers “happily shell out three or four times the price of a mass market on deluxe hardcovers with colorfully stained edges on the paper or other embellishments.”

‘One more nail in a coffin’

Industry insiders are mourning what they see as an end to accessible literature. Mass-market paperbacks “democratized America,” Esther Margolis, the publisher of Newmarket Books, said to Publishers Weekly. For the equivalent of a dollar or two, “you could be educated,” she said to NPR. You could “pick them up at the school book fair” or at the local gas station. “You can’t really do that today.”

While Anne Paulson, the store manager and a bookseller at Cherry Street Books in Minnesota, was saddened by the decline of the paperback, she is not surprised. “I knew that it was coming,” Paulson said to Alexandria Echo Press. The shift away from mass markets “may take brand new books out of people’s hands” who could not “otherwise afford a brand new book.” It is “just one more nail in a coffin of removing reading and literacy from our radar.”

The removal of mass-market paperbacks is an “indication of the book affordability crisis,” R. Nassor said at Book Riot. Ultimately, “I can accept mass-market paperbacks as a thing of the past” but not the “existing cheap alternatives as a consolation prize.” A trade paperback that is “50% more expensive — even accounting for inflation” and a “pricey monthly book subscription are not enough to replace a $10 book you could own.” Now is not the time to “roll back affordable options for consumers in any entertainment space.” And it doesn’t help that editorial teams are not “seeing dramatic increases in wages as a result of rolling back affordable book formats.”

The American journalist Gabriel Sherman has been reporting on the Murdoch family for nearly two decades, and has “interviewed them all at one time or another”, said Lynn Barber in The Spectator. So “he really knows his stuff”. Now, he has produced this “utterly gripping book” about Rupert Murdoch’s relationship with his children, and the family’s acrimonious “war of succession” over his media empire. Things came to a head in 2024, when Rupert tried to amend an “irrevocable” family trust set up in 1999. It had established that Prudence (his daughter by his first wife) and Lachlan, Elisabeth and James (his children by his second wife) would inherit his estate equally, but Rupert now wanted Lachlan, the most right-wing of them, to assume full control of the business. The other siblings took legal action and blocked the move – though they later agreed to it, in exchange for $1.1bn each. Reportedly, Prudence, Elisabeth and James are now estranged from their father.

The “great benefit” of this book is its brevity, said Tina Brown in The Observer. Sherman distils “seven decades of dominance and predation by the world’s most rampant media mastodon” into just over 200 pages, to expose “patterns of ruthlessness” that were repeated over and again. I witnessed this ruthlessness myself in the 1980s, when Murdoch fired my late husband, Harry Evans, from his job as editor of The Times the morning after his father’s funeral. He has been equally “carnivorous” with his children – persuading them to work for him, knowingly overpromoting them, then blaming them “when they failed”. He did this most spectacularly with James, who was in charge of his father’s British newspapers at the time of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Not content with merely sacking his son, Rupert, in a “hideous Hunger Games-like scene”, got Elisabeth to do the job for him – after which the “siblings didn’t speak for years”.

At one point, the family feud “seemed to contain the fate of Western democracy”, said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. While Lachlan supported Fox News’ hard right, pro-Trump agenda, James had “started calling out misinformation”. By handing sole control of his empire to Lachlan, Murdoch made sure that James could not lead a revolution there – but at what cost? Sherman likens him to King Midas: he “built a $17bn fortune but destroyed everything he loved in the process”. The patriarch might say some of his kids were ungrateful for their inherited riches. After reading this book, I felt they’d have “swapped the money for a functional family”.

‘Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World’ by Gabriel Sherman

Not merely a great read, Gabriel Sherman’s brief new history of the Murdoch family is also “a brilliant guide to how not to love your children,” said Matthew Lynn in The Washington Post. At the heart of Sherman’s story, of course, stands Rupert Murdoch, who inherited an Australian newspaper at age 21 and built from it a global media empire that, particularly by way of Fox News, has remade the U.S. news landscape and, in Sherman’s view, fueled the rise of Donald Trump. In recent decades, Murdoch, now 94, has subjected his oldest adult children to withering takedowns and has also pitted them against one another. But while the veteran journalist has done “a magnificent job” of getting inside the family feud, “there is a flaw at the narrative’s heart,” because he ignores business logic by presenting the children who hoped to abandon Fox’s conservative tilt as the two who deserved to win.

Whether you’re rooting for Liz, Lachlan, or James among Rupert’s potential heirs, “it’s a wonder all three are not in a psych ward,” said Tina Brown in The Observer (U.K.). “The great benefit of Bonfire of the Murdochs is its brevity,” because the distillation brings out Rupert’s repeated ruthlessness in matters of both business and family. Now on his fifth marriage, he has dumped four wives in all, including one, Jerry Hall, via a terse email. Meanwhile, he forced or lured Liz, Lachlan, and James into joining the family business, only to betray each of them. He had James take the fall for the 2011 phone-hacking scandal at the U.K. tabloid News of the World, then tasked Liz with firing her brother. And even Lachlan, who shares his father’s paleo-conservative worldview and was therefore granted control of Fox News, ultimately had to accept that much of the Murdoch empire had been sold out from under him when Rupert passed off 20th Century Fox to Disney for $71 billion in 2019.

There’s “something almost novelistic” in the trajectory of the Murdoch tale, said Andrew O’Hagan in The New Yorker. Rupert spent seven decades building his empire, then tore apart his family to prevent any of them from inheriting it intact, leaving his six children with payoffs of $1.1 billion each and his favored son atop Fox Corp. and News Corp. Maybe that end is fitting, because Lachlan carries on “his father’s core business insight: that great fortunes can be made from audiences who prefer their reality falsified.” Maybe Lachlan’s assumption of the throne also makes matters worse. Rupert’s British tabloids, though trashy, have at least been funny. Lachlan’s Fox News is “something darker: a purveyor of apocalyptic doom-mongering where America is a place of perpetual rape, murder, conspiracy, and terror.”

‘The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII’ by Mark Braude

After so many portraits of the Lost Generation that focus on men, “what a relief to come upon a different viewpoint,” said Glynnis MacNicol in The New York Times. In Janet Flanner, author Mark Braude has found an “endlessly compelling subject.” Born in Indianapolis in 1892, Flanner was a writer who befriended many of the biggest names in New York City’s literary circles before crossing the Atlantic and doing the same in Paris. For 50 years, beginning in 1925, she wrote most of the “Letter From Paris” dispatches that appeared in The New Yorker, starting with wry reports that filled readers in on the exploits of pals such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Josephine Baker. And while “it’s eye-opening to realize how much of our collective idea of 1920s Paris comes from Flanner,” this talented free spirit was just getting started.

Flanner’s story is unfortunately regularly interrupted by short passages about a second figure, said Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Eugen Weidmann might be “the dullest and most hapless serial killer ever,” yet Braude has decided to revisit the German wanderer’s murders, trial, and 1939 execution by French authorities because the French arguably poured their anxiety about imminent war into the drama. The Weidmann story wasn’t any kind of career peak for Flanner, said Michael O’Donnell in The Wall Street Journal. “Nor was the war.” She had been glib at times about a potential invasion and in late 1939 fled Europe, returning only after Paris’ 1944 liberation. Still, she’d been savvy enough in 1936 to write a profile of Adolf Hitler meant to be alarming, and in the postwar years she redeemed herself with her coverage of the Nazi death camps and the Nuremberg trials.

While little connects Weidmann to Flanner, said Brad Pearce in the New York Post, Braude’s pairing of the stories “brings 1930s Paris to life for modern readers.” It also throws a spotlight on the largely forgotten Flanner, who “deserves to be celebrated.” She was a master of “understated but incisive irony” and her style was “so influential that, without knowing it, many now write like her or at least try to.”

‘Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind’ by Jason Zengerle

If you wonder how the GOP transformed from free-market champs to MAGA in less than 30 years, “you could do worse than using the arc of Tucker Carlson’s career as your lens,” said Jennifer Burns in The New York Times. “And if you’re looking for insight into the right-wing pundit’s transformations, you’ll definitely want to read Jason Zengerle’s breezy, entertaining, and ultimately disquieting Hated by All the Right People.” The veteran political reporter, currently a New Yorker staff writer, first met his subject when Carlson was a talented Weekly Standard writer and bow-tied rising young star of the center right. While the course that the 56-year-old Carlson’s career has taken since then should be disturbing to anyone who values responsible journalism, his story is “not so much a Greek tragedy as a particularly American one.”

Zengerle’s book, published by a new imprint created by three former Obama White House staffers, is “the first to reckon critically with arguably the most dangerous media personality of the Trump age,” said J. Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. Carlson, in his current incarnation as the host of a popular independent podcast, has moved even further to the right than he had when his 2016–23 Fox News program became cable news’s most watched show. But he remains in regular communication with President Trump and is considered a potential future presidential candidate himself. Zengerle’s “smart, well-written” book tracks Carlson’s career closely, reminding us of the pundit’s flameouts at CNN, PBS, and MSNBC as well as his 2010 bid, with the launch of The Daily Caller, to create a news site he believed might become the Right’s answer to The New York Times. Hated by All the Right People leaves some important questions unanswered, including whether Carlson truly believes some of the tinfoil-hat views he currently espouses. But Zengerle leaves no doubt about how he judges Carlson’s ethics, writing that his subject has “descended into madness.”

Was there “a definitive moment” when yesterday’s Carlson became the one we know today? asked Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. Zengerle’s account suggests the shift happened in steps, as TV and then the internet began rewarding extreme positions and Carlson repeatedly chose that path to fame and power. “Once Carlson became a slave to virality, his extremism was all but assured.” Today, the son of a Ronald Reagan appointee chats amiably on his show with Holocaust deniers, slurs Volodymyr Zelensky, and praises Vladimir Putin. It hardly matters what Carlson actually believes, because millions of listeners, including Trump, take cues from him. Thanks to his long pursuit of influence, “he has become disastrously entertaining.”

‘Football’ by Chuck Klosterman

“Football is unlike any book on the sport to come before,” said Zack
Ruskin in the San Francisco Chronicle. Chuck Klosterman’s new nonfiction best seller is “a hybrid of memoir, sports reporting, and cultural critique” that asks why America loves the game above all other pastimes. In 13 previous books, the 53-year-old North Dakota native “has written with equal fervor about the Boston Celtics, hair metal bands, and the practical limitations of time travel,” but he confesses that no subject has loomed larger in his mind than the violent, television-friendly game he has followed since childhood. Each of the 11 essays in this book offer “fresh, fascinating” perspectives, starting with the provocative notion that football’s cultural dominance can’t last forever.

“Klosterman’s thesis for why football so captures the American spirit isn’t completely novel,” said Derek Robertson in The Washington Examiner. “He argues in so many words that it represents the irreducible remainder of danger, bravado, and risk in human existence,” making it a game that invites morbid fascination. His suggestion that it’ll fade in importance rests on the notion that Americans’ relationship to danger will change enough over the next 50 or 100 years that disruptions caused by player strikes or shifts in the game’s financial infrastructure will be enough to sever fans’ deep connection to the spectacle. Horse racing, he notes, was huge when many Americans lived with horses. But a reader needn’t buy his doomsday pitch, because it’s “ultimately secondary to Klosterman’s trenchant, funny ruminations on the sport.”

“One of the most surprising and winning aspects of the book is how wonky it is, how obsessive about actual gameplay,” said Will Leitch in NYMag.com. Klosterman played high school ball and dreamed at the time of stalking the sidelines as an offensive coordinator for a major college team, and his love for the game’s minutiae hasn’t diminished even as his perspective has deepened. Chapter topics include brain injuries, racism, and the best players of all time, and each time, “he digs deep, asking stirring questions,” said Edward Banchs in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. So persuasive are his predictions that Football will be “a book worth keeping around.”

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February might be the shortest month of the year, but it features plenty of days to add books to your 2026 reading list. Just in time for Black History Month, we have previously unpublished work from the late literary icon Toni Morrison. And for readers seeking the butterflies of Valentine’s Day, there’s a dark romance by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

‘Autobiography of Cotton’ by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Christina MacSweeney

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cristina Rivera Garza is back with another genre-bending book. It is set in Estación Camarón, a “cotton farming region in northern Mexico,” said The New York Times.

The novel examines the region “by way of family history and literary criticism to reveal a legacy of inequality and ecological destruction.” The book is a “fusion of fiction and nonfiction that excavates both national and family history,” said The Wall Street Journal. Her novel is “one of restless movement and passionate hope.” (out now, $17, Graywolf Press, Amazon)

‘Heap Earth Upon It’ by Chloe Michelle Howarth

The follow-up to Chloe Michelle Howarth’s “Sunburn” has been pitched by its publisher as a “new take on sapphic obsession for fans of ‘All Our Wives Under the Sea.’” The story follows a pair of siblings who move to the Irish town of Ballycrea in 1965 and are hiding secrets. The siblings are taken under the wing of a wealthy couple, and one of the sisters soon becomes obsessed with the wife. Howarth’s highly anticipated sophomore release is an “engrossing chronicle of restlessness and desire,” said Publishers Weekly. (out now, $21, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon’ by Toni Morrison

It has been seven years since her death, but Toni Morrison “still has more to say,” said the Times. This nonfiction collection of previously unpublished work is a “compilation of lectures for a class she taught at Princeton University on the American literary canon” that explores classics by “Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Poe, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor and others.” Through her “original, often dazzling close readings,” Morrison shows how the “idea of race has been a primal force in the nation’s literature — shaping, disfiguring and, sometimes, liberating language and the imagination.” (out now, $32, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies and the Greatest Miracle of All Time’ by Joshua Bennett

In his “personal and clear-eyed examination of Black prodigies,” MIT professor Joshua Bennett “movingly shows that true genius is nurtured and protected by love,” said BookPage. Bennett illustrates that “genius is no solitary struggle,” citing poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, whose work is “not only a testament to innate talent bolstered by a rich literary education, but also the culmination of parental affirmation and community care.”

The book “stands firm in the often unacknowledged truth”: To be Black and gifted is to “experience the tension between hypervisibility and invisibility.” (out now, $30, Hachette Book Group, Amazon)

‘Kin’ by Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones returns, eight years after her acclaimed novel “An American Marriage,” with a “historical tale of friendship and family,” said the Times. The novel follows Niecy and Annie, two orphans living in Jim Crow Louisiana, who bond as children.

When they grow older, they realize they both still “yearn for the family they never knew,” said the Times, and take “alternate paths to uncovering, or building, the life they didn’t have.” Said Kirkus Reviews, ‘Kin’ is “beautifully written and powerfully compelling.” (Feb. 24, $32, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

Alwyn Turner specialises in “bottom-up history – or, to be more precise, middle-up history”, said Robbie Millen in The Times. In his series of books on 20th-century Britain, his focus has been not so much on high politics as on “the ordinary, suburban and middlebrow”. In the latest, Turner sets out to “take the temperature” of the nation in the 20 years after the First World War. While he doesn’t ignore big events – the General Strike, the abdication crisis, the rise of the blackshirts – what preoccupies him is the “stuff of daily life”: what people were buying, what they were reading, “what entertained them on stage or in the flicks”. And so we learn about the radio-fuelled craze for “outrageous new dances” – the shag, the shimmy, the Suzie Q – and the era’s new consumer goods: “the Aga cooker, the Anglepoise lamp, the Goblin Teasmade”. We learn about the craze for “pot-boiling crime thrillers”, and for the “low-key adventures of Rupert the Bear”. Turner’s account is “witty and wide-ranging” and – refreshingly – he doesn’t scold his subjects for “not passing 21st-century morality tests”.

We think of the interwar years as a far-off era, “cosier and more patriotic” than our own, said Andrew Marr in The New Statesman. Yet, as Turner shows, there are striking parallels between the two periods. The 1920s was a time of political turmoil, with the two-party system breaking down, as “attention-grabbing challengers” came from Left and Right”, and “constant criticism of the second-rate, wooden-tongued national leaders in No. 10”. The “unruly new media” were lambasted for spreading lies and half-truths, and even today’s trans debate was foreshadowed by the “media outrage over androgynous haircuts and dress codes”. Building his account from newspapers and magazines, Turner has produced a typically “sharp and often surprising read”.

While the 1920s was a decade of stagnation, as Britain struggled to recover from the First World War, by the early 1930s the economy was “on an upswing”, said Jane Shaw in the Financial Times. Some 2.5 million houses were built during this decade, and there was a motoring boom, fuelled by the arrival of “cheaper cars, like the Austin Seven”. Britain became more “mobile and more connected, and one result was cheap holidays: Billy Butlin opened his first holiday camp in 1936”. I wish I’d had a history teacher like Turner, said Juliet Nicolson in The Spectator. With his “gift for wit and tenderness”, he makes the past feel knowable. “This is history at its most fun, immersive, human and revelatory.”

‘Vigil: A Novel’ by George Saunders

George Saunders’ slim new novel is “a strikingly weird work of modern
fiction,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Like Lincoln in the Bardo, the author’s 2017 Booker Prize winner, Vigil concerns the liminal space between life and death, yet this story “seems to have risen up from the loamy soil of medieval allegory.” As K.J. Boone, former CEO of the world’s largest oil company, lies on his deathbed, he’s visited by various ghosts, including two who initiate a debate about whether to comfort Boone as his end nears or confront him with the enormous damage he’s done. Though Saunders’ language here is “rarely specifically Christian,” the story is “explicitly moral.” And because it’s a George Saunders book, Vigil is “full of philosophical musings, corny antics, and plaintive yearnings set down in lines as surprising and agile as deer.”

Given that Boone is depicted as indisputably guilty of and unrepentant about a world-wrecking career, “there is little moral work to do here,” said Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. Fortunately, the story’s narrator, a ghost whose name in life was Jill “Doll” Blaine, is a “far more interesting creature.” Since her death in early adulthood in the 1960s, she has felt obliged to ease other souls from life into death. As she wrestles with whether Boone merits her usual kindnesses, Jill also suffers reminders of her previous life as a mortal, and it’s as unfinished souls that she and Saunders’ other ghosts are most compelling. Still, Saunders, a short-story master, has now written two consecutive novels about final reckonings watched over by comically argumentative spirits. “What once felt anarchic has hardened into habit, a repertoire of tricks and tics.” A self-help book disguised as literature, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times, “it’s going to be an enormous best seller for depressing reasons.”

Vigil, because it wrestles with today’s world in a way Lincoln in the Bardo did not, proves the “more morally gripping” novel, said Gary Sernovitz in Bloomberg. The 87-year-old Boone is clearly modeled on former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, who during his 1993–2005 reign aggressively championed fossil fuel production and fought the findings of climate change science. Saunders, “just by being a master of American fiction,” makes us see such corporate leaders in a different light. “Which of us, Saunders might be asking, will not have regrets on our deathbed, and which of us will not wish to keep them at bay?” said Pico Iyer in Air Mail. Yes, he is less storyteller here than moral instructor, but he has cooked up “a jaunty, irreverent, and constantly surprising sermon on forgiveness.” With the possible exception of Bardo, “I’ve
never read anything like this before,” and “if I’m lucky, I’ll never forget it.”

‘Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage’ by Heather Ann Thompson

“For a time, everyone knew Bernie Goetz’s name and face,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. In late 1984, the 37-year-old Manhattan resident shot four Black teenagers on a subway train after one had asked him for $5, and instead of being treated as a murderous racist, Goetz was hailed by the tabloid press as a vigilante hero. Surveys indicated that more than half of all New Yorkers supported him, including 45% of the city’s Black residents. Heather Ann Thompson, who won a Pulitzer for her 2016 book on the 1971 Attica prison uprising, has now delivered a similarly detailed reconstruction of the Goetz shooting and ensuing trials, and while she’s “doggedly fair-minded” in her presentation of the facts, “she treats the Goetz episode as the first whitecap on the surge of racial rage that rose with the Reagan era and has carried into our own.”

“Importantly, Thompson rejects stereotyping the teens as thuggish stickup kids,” said Walton Muyumba in The Boston Globe. “Instead, she crafts social, personal, and familial narratives to humanize them,” and she reminds readers that Goetz admitted that the teenagers didn’t threaten him and that he had boarded the train ready to kill anyone who approached him. It was his defense team that persuaded jurors to view Goetz as feeling threatened. Disorder was rampant in the city at the time, and Thompson provides a “sharply accurate” explanation of why that was so. Still, her argument that white rage was a response called forth by Reagan-era politics “seems slightly askew,” because white rage is, in fact, “older than the nation itself.”

Still, Thompson’s “powerful and moving” narrative runs a course similar to outrages we witness today, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. While one of his victims, 19-year-old Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed and suffered permanent brain damage in the shooting, he and the other victims were villainized, even receiving piles of hate mail. Thompson doesn’t end by dwelling on such hate. Instead, she turns our attention to the care Cabey received from his mother, and “it’s an affecting reminder of the love that, amid all the forces of ‘fear and fury,’ we cannot allow ourselves to forget.”

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The blockbuster series “Fifty Shades of Grey” notoriously started as racy fan fiction based on the young adult vampire series “Twilight.” Despite its humble beginnings, this famous example proved that fanfic websites could be catnip for an already established fan base. Since then, several fan fiction authors have crossed over into major mainstream success by turning their tales into original stories.

‘City of Bones’ by Cassandra Clare (2007)

The first book of the popular young adult fantasy series “The Mortal Instruments” can trace its roots to author Cassandra Clare’s fan fiction, the “Draco Trilogy,” set in the “Harry Potter” universe. The stories centered on Draco Malfoy and followed him through “various happenings at Hogwarts, including a romance with Ginny Weasley,” said Business Insider.

The “fantastical demon-hunting universe” of the book series is “vastly different from the source of its magical inspiration,” but some “small character details carry over.” The heroine of the novel, Clary, is a “spirited redhead,” while Jace, her romantic interest, is “a snarky blonde, mirroring the dynamic of Ginny and Draco.” (out now, $9, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Throne of Glass’ by Sarah J. Maas (2012)

Sarah J. Maas has become synonymous with the fantasy genre and BookTok, but she got her start writing fan fiction based on “Sailor Moon” anime. Her debut novel began as a story loosely based on Cinderella that she began writing as a 16-year-old in 2002, called “Queen of Glass.”

When the story became one of the most popular on FictionPress, a sister platform to FanFiction.net, Maas took it down to develop it into a traditional novel instead. Since then, the book has become part of one of the author’s most popular fantasy series, gaining popularity after being rediscovered by BookTok creators. (out now, $19, Bloomsbury, Amazon)

‘After’ by Anna Todd (2014)

Another widespread use of fanfic is reimagining real-life celebrities as fictional characters. Even though they have since disbanded, the boy band One Direction was once a popular source of inspiration. Anna Todd’s 2014 novel, “After,” began as a fanfic on the social storytelling platform Wattpad, with an edgy love interest modeled after former member Harry Styles. His bandmates were featured as side characters.

“After” follows “bright-eyed” Tessa during her freshman year of college, where she meets a “broody, tattooed British deviant” named Hardin Scott, said Business Insider. While the male characters’ names have been changed, “they each still start with the same letter as their real boy band counterparts.” The romantic series has been adapted into four films starring Hero Fiennes-Tiffin as the renamed Scott and Josephine Langford as Tessa Young. The final installment, “After Everything,” premiered on Netflix last fall. (out now, $22, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘The Love Hypothesis’ by Ali Hazelwood (2021)

A more recent example of fan fiction running through the traditional publishing route is Ali Hazelwood’s TikTok viral novel, “The Love Hypothesis.” The novel not only propelled Hazelwood into a New York Times bestselling author but also “marked the entrance of ‘Star Wars’ into the traditionally published fan fiction canon,” said People.

Hazelwood’s book is based on a story originally published on fan fiction website Archive of Our Own about Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker, characters introduced in 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” said Vulture. The pairing, often referred to as Reylo, helped the author attract the attention of an agent who suggested she rework the fanfic into something original. (out now, $16, Simon and Schuster, Amazon)

‘Alchemised’ by SenLinYu (2025)

This one features Harry Potter characters Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger as an enemies-to-lovers couple, a pairing known as Dramione that has spurred multiple fan fictions. SenLinYu’s “Alchemised” was just one of the Dramione-coded novels published last year, alongside “Rose in Chains” by Julie Soto and “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy” by Brigitte Knightley.

SenLinYu’s debut is a dark romance and “gargantuan doorstopper clocking in at over a thousand pages” that’s “not for the faint of heart,” said Paste Magazine. It’s a “marathon of dark, disturbing and often extremely upsetting imagery” that comes with “extensive content and trigger warnings” that are “no joke.” (out now, $35, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s memoir opens in 2021, on the day of her wedding to Salman Rushdie. “I am marrying a man that some people have deemed dangerous,” she writes. “What harm could find us on such a day?” One might assume that these “overt intimations of tragedy” refer to the attack on Rushdie 11 months later, in which he was stabbed 15 times and lost sight in his right eye, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer. But “in fact, her account of the attack comes relatively late in the book, the greater part of which is concerned with the tragedy that preceded it – one that didn’t make international headlines”.

This is the death, from unknown causes, of her best friend and fellow poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who’d been expected at the wedding, but had “failed to turn up”. Only late on the day itself did Griffiths learn what happened, making it “the best and worst day of my life”. Her memoir – which is “preoccupied with death and trauma” while also being, at times, “surprisingly funny” – is an account of Griffiths’ “formation as a poet and artist, an evolution inseparable from her friendship” with Moon.

This is a “frank and disorientating memoir”, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. It records the abuse Griffiths experienced as a child, and the depression and anxiety that hospitalised her several times in her 20s. Despite her desire to write, she “struggled to find the words to break through her numbness”. It was only after meeting Moon, while studying creative writing in New York, that she began to recognise her artistic talent. Infected with “literary madness”, the pair “exchanged stories of trauma”, bonded over the black writers they loved (Alice Walker, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton), drank too much and wrote poetry together, said Leigh Haber in The Washington Post. While others discouraged Griffiths from writing, “Moon cheered her on”. Now, in this “open wound of a memoir”, she has honoured the woman she came to regard as her “chosen sister”.

Griffiths also writes movingly of her relationship with Rushdie, whom she met in New York in 2017, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. While their early courtship is tinged with comedy – at their first meeting, he “collided with a plate-glass door that he thought was open” – their relationship becomes subsumed in the darker themes of the book. “Evocative” and “full-bodied”, if at times a “little overcooked”, “The Flower Bearers” is a “visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation” – but also a powerful “love story” and “portrait of sisterhood”.

There is something about a bookshop: peace and quiet, fleeting rays of sunlight cutting through old windows, and that distinctive smell. Hugh Grant’s bookshop in “Notting Hill” may be the most famous, but we’ve found some alternatives that aren’t packed to the rafters with tourists.

Here are some of the best bookshops in the UK that are worth travelling for.

Hay Cinema Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye, Wales

There is no better place for “bibliophiles and avid readers” than the Hay Cinema Bookshop, said Chris Moss in The Telegraph. “Exploring its shelves is akin to being inside a capacious old library that is fairly ordered and also full of surprises.”

Hay-on-Wye itself is considered “Wales’ premier bookshop-opolis”, with more than 20 specialist retailers “scattered” around the town. This, however, is certainly the most “special”, boasting more than 200,000 second-hand and antiquarian volumes.

Established in 1965, it may not be the oldest on this list, but it has books on “every subject conceivable”, and once you have finished browsing, The Old Black Lion pub nearby is an excellent spot to read and watch the world go by.

Barter Books, Alnwick, Northumberland

Set in a “grand Victorian railway station”, you can “alight here for a unique reading refuge”. Barter Books is home to more than “350,000 works of fact and fiction” in “one of Britain’s biggest second-hand bookshops”, said Lauran Elsden in Country Living.

The venue has stayed true to its roots, with a model railway set “chugging away” among the “generously stacked” shelves. You can round off the experience with a Northumbrian rarebit or bacon butty at the station buffet in the old boiler room, against the backdrop of “North Eastern Railway cast-iron fireplaces” and “magnificent marble mantelpieces”.

The Heath Bookshop, King’s Heath, Birmingham

The Heath Bookshop won The Bookseller’s Independent Bookshop of the Year award in 2025. A great example of community engagement, the Heath is considered the “cultural heart” of the area. In 2024, it ran more than 80 events, so be prepared to join in when you visit!

The Heath is a “notably progressive and inclusive” shop, with a wide selection of books by LGBTQ+, Black and Asian authors. Co-owners Catherine and Claire have “done an amazing job with their space and they’re not playing it safe – there’s a real disruptor energy there,” said the judges. This is the type of bookshop you “feel like you want to hang out”.

Far From the Madding Crowd, Linlithgow, Scotland

This “much-loved” book shop takes its name from the Thomas Hardy classic, said Sarah Barrell in National Geographic. It occupies one of the “handsome Georgian buildings flanking the high street” of this Scottish market town and is open every day of the week to book-lovers and culture-vultures alike. Aptly, it has a “strong selection” of Scottish titles, and even features a “bothy” perfect for quiet reading. It describes itself as an “indie bookshop with a bit on the side”, and with poetry evenings, a view of the loch, and a shop bunny called BB, it is well “worth the literary pilgrimage”.

Daunt Books, Marylebone, London

Not quite a hidden gem, Daunt Books is one of the “best-known” independents in the capital, said Luciana Bellini in Glossary. Now with six stores in London, the expansive Edwardian building on Marylebone High Street is by far “the most beautiful”. Between each page turn in your “comfortable reading nook”, gaze up at the “long oak galleries and stained-glass window”, away from the hustle and bustle of the capital’s streets.

‘The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives and Divides Us’ by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

“Rebecca Newberger Goldstein isn’t the first philosopher to argue that we are driven by the quest to justify our existence,” said John Kaag in The Atlantic. But in her stirring new book, the accomplished author presents the pursuit of what she calls “mattering”—an idea she introduced in her 1983 novel, The Mind-Body Problem—as the human instinct that overrides all others. Seeking to pinpoint the origin of the instinct and exploring how its existence informs the definition of a life well lived, she comes to “a somewhat surprising conclusion”: that we are all fighting entropy—the tendency of any closed system to slide into chaos—and any of us is living a good life if we are contributing to that fight by assisting in, in her words, “the spread of flourishing, knowledge, love, joyfulness, peace, kindness, comity, beauty.”

Goldstein groups people into four mattering types, and those categories prove “very helpful,” said Yascha Mounk in Persuasion. “Socializers,” she says, find meaning in being useful to others. “Competitors,” meanwhile, seek to matter more than others. “Transcenders,” in turn, look for fulfillment in their relationship to the divine, while “heroic strivers” set a standard of excellence for themselves and chase it. All four types of pursuit can go awry, as Goldstein shows, and it’s hard to see exactly how any of us can be certain we don’t take such a path. But her systematic approach to defining the good life is “going to change how I think about the world,” and it’s reassuring to read about examples of journeys heading in a destructive direction that turn toward the good. In one story she tells, a neo-Nazi skinhead befriends Black inmates in prison, finds a Jewish mentor, and has since dedicated his life to fighting extremism.

“As philosophy, The Mattering Instinct stands on uncertain foundations,” said Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal. Goldstein, with her love of physics, makes much of the connection between “matter” the verb and “matter” the noun, but the overlap is really just a quirk of English. She also talks about “mattering instinct” and “longing to matter” as if the phrases are interchangeable, but “an instinct is innate” while “a longing is culturally determined.” More problematically, she imagines that we may one day arrive at a way to objectively distinguish between the ways that individuals seek to matter while being open-minded enough to accept that everyone seeks meaning in their own way. That’s not the pursuit of truth through logic. That’s wishful thinking, and the wide readership this book has enjoyed is further evidence of “an entire civilization undergoing an existential crisis.”

‘Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor’ by Christine Kuehn

We all have family secrets, but “few have darker ones than Christine
Kuehn,” said David A. Taylor in the Washington Independent Review of Books. In her best-selling memoir, the first-time author shares a story long withheld from her: Her German grandparents were Nazi spies who channeled enough information used in the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that her grandfather was the only person convicted for the attack. “Surely this must be historical fiction,” you’ll think, said Julia M. Klein in The Forward. But several years before Pearl Harbor, Otto and Friedel Kuehn were rising figures in Nazi party when their daughter, 19-year-old Ruth, began an affair with Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi propagandist learned that Ruth’s biological father was Jewish. Soon, the entire family was shipped to Hawaii, with three being paid to gather intelligence.

The story, as told in Family of Spies, is “full of suspenseful twists and cinematic details,” said Sylvia Brownrigg in The New York Times. Otto and Friedel hadn’t been very discreet spies, throwing lavish parties in Hawaii that won them access to U.S. naval officials but also attracted so
much attention that the FBI sent an agent to investigate them. “As the story hurtles toward Dec. 7, 1941,” with the FBI nearly closing in, “the book acquires page-turning urgency.” When the attack comes, Kuehn
describes the devastation vividly, and “ultimately, there is the catharsis of seeing Otto, Friedel, and Ruth apprehended.” But the author’s future father, then 15, was incarcerated, too, and he was innocent.

Kuehn “writes with dual aims,” said Rebecca Brenner Graham in The Washington Post. She seeks to understand what her father went through as he was blindsided by his family’s treachery and broke with them by testifying against his father. She also grapples with whether the other side of the family were monsters, and this through line of the book is “hamstrung by an assumption that people must be monsters to do evil.” While it’s brave of her to condemn her forebears, she’d have been braver to allow that some people who cause great harm are not so different from the rest of us.

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Romance books have experienced a resurgence in popularity thanks to BookTok communities. But for those seeking more intense, morally gray relationships with taboo themes and trigger warnings, dark romance has become the go-to subgenre. Here are some highly recommended dark and twisty romance novels to help you dip your toes into the edgier end of the romantic spectrum.

‘Butcher & Blackbird’ by Brynne Weaver

A viral BookTok fave, this friends-to-lovers dark romantic comedy pairs two rival murderers, Sloane and Rowan, who form an unlikely friendship that blossoms into more. The first book in the “Ruinous Love” trilogy follows the serial-killer duo as they bond over their shared passion for hunting other serial killers. “The Lego Batman Movie” filmmaker Chris McKay has been tapped to direct an upcoming adaptation of the best-selling dark romance, Variety said.

The dark romance genre deals with “darker concepts of past trauma, the concerns about feeling like you’re unlovable or alone in the world,” and that is why it is “becoming more popular,” the book’s author, Brynne Weaver, said to Rolling Stone. “It’s almost like therapy.” (out now, $18, Slow Burn, Amazon)

‘Hooked’ by Emily McIntire

Emily McIntire's dark reimagining of “Peter Pan” is often recommended to readers seeking a dark contemporary romance. In this version of the classic tale, Peter is Wendy's father, and James, the book’s Captain Hook, plans to seduce her to get back at his nemesis.

His plans to destroy his enemy become complicated when he begins to develop real feelings for Wendy. Those who enjoy “dark, adult fairytale retellings” can also dive into the book’s sequels, which cover other familiar stories, Screen Rant said. Anyone who “loves a good villain romance will appreciate these.” (out now, $18, Bloom Books, Amazon)

‘Lights Out’ by Navessa Allen

This stalker romance is a viral TikTok hit among dark romance lovers and the first in a best-selling series. The story has plenty of taboo themes and a morally questionable male lead, but those looking for a good introduction to the genre will find it appealing.

The story follows trauma nurse Aly Cappellucci, who obsesses over masked men on social media, fantasizing about them chasing her down. She captures the attention of Josh Hammond, one of her favorite MaskTok creators, and together they live out their darkest fantasies, blissfully unaware of someone else eying Aly with more sinister intentions. Both the “well-done spicy scenes” and the “great individual character arcs made the novel compelling to audiences” and “expanded the tropes readers can find in the genre,” said Screen Rant. (out now, $19, Slow Burn, Amazon)

‘Phantasma’ by Kaylie Smith

Kaylie Smith’s “Phantasma” is a “captivating dark fantasy romance that blends elements of psychological thriller and gothic horror,” Nerd Daily said. Set in a haunted mansion, the novel follows Ophelia, who must enter a deadly competition to save her sister’s life. Once she joins the contest, she meets Blackwell, a charming, arrogant hero who offers to be her guide through the horrors of the mansion. Smith crafts a “richly atmospheric world, filled with twisting corridors, demonic entities and fatal temptations.” (out now, $19, Hachette Book Group, Amazon)

‘The Ritual’ by Shantel Tessier

This story is a cross between dark academia and dark romance. Barrington University, home to the Lords, a secret society that requires blood as payment, is the setting for book one in Shantel Tessier’s “The Lords” series. Members devote their lives to violence in exchange for the power to control the world. Ryat Alexander Archer, one of the powerful Lords, meets the book’s heroine, Blakely Anderson, and she is sucked into the world of the secret society as she succumbs to her feelings for him. If you are curious about BDSM dynamics, this would be a good book to explore the kinky arrangement. (out now, $25, self-published, Amazon)

‘American Reich: A Murder in Orange County; Neo-Nazis; and a New Age of Hate’ by Eric Lichtblau

The dispiriting nature of author Eric Lichtblau’s latest subject “might be reason enough to avoid this book,” said Wendell Jamieson in Air Mail. But to defeat darkness, “we must first understand it,” and the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist has dug deeply into how racial hatred has spawned deadly violence across the country in recent years, basing his conclusions on “rock solid” reporting. “Oscillating between alarming and infuriating,” American Reich focuses on the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student, by Sam Woodward, a former high school classmate who’d been radicalized, having joined the Atomwaffen Division, a Texas-based neo-Nazi terrorist network. Both young men lived in Southern California’s Orange County, which Lichtblau characterizes as a hotbed for white supremacist thinking that has spread from coast to coast, showing itself most prominently during Jan. 6, 2021’s attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Orange County’s central role in spreading racial hatred “should come as no surprise,” said Costa Beavin Pappas in the Los Angeles Times. In 1906, Santa Ana ordered its Chinatown burned to the ground. In 1936, the Orange County sheriff issued a “shoot to kill” order to deputies seeking to break a strike among Mexican orange-grove workers. From the 1980s on, the county’s music scene has specialized in white-power rock bands, including one that featured the future perpetrator of the 2012 massacre of worshippers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Since 2004, Orange County also has been predominantly nonwhite, but some conservative families, such as Woodward’s, bond over a hateful ideology. In other words, Woodward wasn’t a lone-wolf killer when he pretended to flirt with Bernstein, talking him into getting together before stabbing him 28 times.

Lichtblau contextualizes the murder by thoroughly describing many other recent Southern California hate crimes, said Elon Green in The New York Times. The inclusion of that material proves both the book’s greatest strength and “ultimately, a weakness,” because Bernstein and his killer disappear from the narrative for long stretches. “This is a quibble,” though, as Lichtblau, a former Times reporter, “has done an admirably vivid job of situating Atomwaffen amid a landscape of like-minded groups,” many of which have “risen from the muck of online forums.” Beyond that, Lichtblau “adeptly charts the sustained fallout from Trump’s first successful presidential campaign,” a period that has seen U.S. hate crimes soar to the highest levels since the FBI began tracking them in 1990. Sad as it is to say so, “American Reich is queasily of the moment, and evokes our present reality with frightening detail. One can only hope that someday its subject is relegated to the past.”

‘Winter: The Story of a Season’ by Val McDermid

“Winter is an odd, unexpected, and quite lovely book from Val McDermid, the prolific Scottish mystery writer,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Washington Post. The days are shortand chilly in her corner of the world, but “for McDermid, these cold, dark months are not a time of dormancy—they are the most stimulating of the year.” McDermid, now 70, grew up in a village near St. Andrews, and the arrival of winter brings back happy memories, some of her favorite festival celebrations, and the run of weeks when she is most creative, habitually hunkering down to write a new crime novel. Here, in “short, evocative chapters,” she “glides gracefully from topic to topic,” and while winter is the overarching theme, her delightful book is “mostly about the things that inspire McDermid and make her happy.”

Many of the customs McDermid praises here are distinctively Scottish, said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. On winter’s shortest day, she notes, the sun doesn’t rise until 8:43 a.m. in Edinburgh and sets less than seven hours later. That helps explain Scots’ love for the fireworks that chase away the darkness on Nov. 5’s Bonfire Night and on Hogmanay, a celebration that begins no later than New Year’s Eve Day and can last another day or more. McDermid’s prose is sprinkled throughout with dialect such as neep for rutabaga and dooking, or ducking, for apples. Meanwhile, beautiful black-and-white drawings by Philip Harris help make this little book “a warming meditation on the coldest, darkest time of the year.”

“There are points where McDermid is revealing about the process of writing,” said Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman, and some readers may turn to the book for those insights. But even when she’s focused on winter traditions, “it is the absences that intrigue me.” Though she writes about Christmas and gift exchanges, she doesn’t write about the holiday’s religious traditions or treat it as the center of the season. And while she mentions a youthful dalliance with the folk scene and a grandfather
jailed for selling black-market cigarettes, she resists making her past fully known. Even so, “Winter allows McDermid a space to write unlike herself,” and it makes a stirring love letter to the least-celebrated season.

In 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published “what could well be the most important table in modern public health”, said Tom Whipple in The Times. For decades, American waistlines had been expanding “inexorably”. But the 2024 assessment of “how fat the country was” revealed a change: the “number of fat people was just a little bit lower than it had been”. No one was in any doubt as to why. In 2017, a Danish company, Novo Nordisk, had released a new diabetes medication called Ozempic, which listed “weight loss” among its side effects.

As Aimee Donnellan makes clear in her “meticulously reported account” of the drug’s emergence, its inventors “always realised that the ‘side effect’ would really be the main effect”. And so it proved. Ozempic and other “GLP-1 agonists” – or “fat drugs” – are starting to bring down obesity in many places. As it becomes possible to take them as pills rather than injections, and (perhaps more significantly still) when they come “off patent”, their impact could be even more dramatic.

“Like all great tales of scientific discovery, the weight-loss jabs saga is rich in serendipity, rivalry and obsession,” said Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. Donnellan recounts it all “with relish”. She highlights the role played by Svetlana Mojsov, a Macedonian chemist whose research in the 1970s into glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) paved the way for Ozempic, which works by mimicking the hormone’s effects; and she details the starring role played by the Gila monster, a type of lizard in whose saliva a useful peptide was found. Donnellan also addresses the “fraught social and cultural context” that has helped make these drugs such a talking point. For every person who takes them as a medical necessity, she notes, there will be others who simply want to “fit into smaller dresses, or obtain the slender aesthetic social media demands of them”.

Donnellan interviews people whose lives were transformed by Ozempic, said David A. Shaywitz in The Wall Street Journal. A 34-year-old marketer named Sarah says that because she was thinner, she was “included in important meetings” and received a pay rise. Donnellan’s “verdict on GLP-1s” isn’t one of unalloyed positivity. She asks if they’re a case of “treating the symptom”, rather than the cause, and questions what it says about society that a weight-loss jab can be so transformational. Overall, she delivers “a nuanced view” of “these unsettling medical marvels”.

“Once scorned by purists as the fake Rolexes of the reading world”, audiobooks are booming, said Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times. As the industry continues to thrive, the definition of what it means to be a reader is shifting. But does listening to a book instead of poring over its pages count as reading?

Queen Camilla certainly thinks so. During a visit this week to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to launch a reading initiative, she was presented with a special edition of The Beano comic. In it, her cartoon character tells Dennis and his dog Gnasher: “Go all in for the National Year of Reading, Dennis! Comics and audiobooks count too!”

Pride and snobbery

Income from audiobooks generated by UK publishers rose by 31% in 2023–24, reaching a record £268 million, according to figures from the Publishers Association.

But many people don’t think audiobooks “qualify” as proper reading, said Brian Bannon, chief librarian at the New York Public Library, in The New York Times. “There is a pride – even a snobbishness – to being well read.” Telling someone that you have listened to a book instead of reading the physical copy often “comes out sounding like an apology”. In fact, an NPR-Ipsos poll conducted last year found that 41% of American adults believe “listening to audiobooks is not a form of reading”.

Our minds sometimes “wander” when we’re reading or listening, David Daniel, a psychology professor at James Madison University in Virginia, told Time. Snapping out of these “little mental sojourns” and finding your place again in the text isn’t as easy when you’re listening to a recording, especially when you are “grappling” with a complex piece of writing. “Turning the page of a book also gives you a slight break”, creating a “space for your brain to store or savour the information you’re absorbing”.

“There’s no doubt reading is good for us,” said Helen Thomson in New Scientist. An array of studies tie “good literacy in childhood with physical and mental health – and even longer life”.

The evidence for audiobooks is “thinner, but reassuring”. Most studies find “comprehension is broadly similar regardless of whether you’re reading or listening to a book”. However, there are some “subtle differences”: a meta-analysis of 46 studies found reading had “the slight edge” when it comes to “making inferences about a text – such as interpreting a character’s feelings”.

How you listen can also impact cognition. “Listening to audiobooks isn’t necessarily detrimental,” said Janet Geipel, an assistant professor at the University of Exeter. What can be problematic is the way attention is managed: when you are concentrating, listening can be “just as effective as reading”, but if you try to “multitask” your “depth of processing may be lower than when you sit down and read without distraction”.

‘Hugely positive’

“Audiobooks were my lifesaver,” said Miranda Larbi in Stylist. They turned out to be a “gateway for physical books – a key for unlocking a world that felt totally inaccessible”. “Gloomy” news coverage often focuses on how fewer children are finding pleasure in reading, so I found the National Literacy Trust’s new report, that more than 40% of children are using audiobooks to read, “hugely positive”.

The “content” is more important than the “medium” when it comes to reading, Debbie Hicks, creative director of the Reading Agency, told The Guardian. And audiobooks can be a great way to appeal to those who are “less inclined to read”, like men. It’s crucial we “reframe what it means to be a reader”, moving past the “traditional hierarchical values” that still put physical books at the top.

To suggest that reading books is the “only kind of reading that counts” does a “disservice” to the “many dyslexic or visually challenged booklovers among us”, said Roy in the Financial Times. Audiobooks should be seen as a “parallel way to read”, not dismissed as inferior.

The “destigmatising” of audiobooks could offer a “path to a more nuanced way of thinking about literacy”, said Bannon in The New York Times. “However we read – by eye, by ear or both – it all counts. We need more readers – however they get there.”

Julian Barnes’ latest book has the words “a novel” printed “bold as brass” on the cover, said Clare McHugh in The Washington Post. But it soon becomes clear that the celebrated author – who has just turned 80 – has “not merely blurred the line between fact and fiction; he has expunged it”.

“Departure(s)” begins with a “rambling meditation on the nature of memory”, examining the “involuntary” and “sudden recollections” that appear, like the familiar smells that can, without warning, transport people back to another time.

In part two, we dive into a “story” that we are told is “true”, said Frances Wilson in The Spectator. We meet Stephen and Jean – a pair of students who are introduced to each other by Barnes during their time at Oxford in the mid 1960s. Their relationship ends after 18 months and they lose touch. But after a “40-year silence”, Barnes receives an email from Stephen out of the blue “to ask if he might reunite him with Jean”. The pair rekindle their relationship and marry – only for things to fall apart again.

To what extent Barnes is “to blame for the failure of their second go-round” is unclear, “not least because the ground keeps shifting”, said Alex Clark in The Guardian. His characters may or may not be real, but Barnes is “excellent, and always has been, at this kind of Pooterish persona”.

The final section sees Barnes delve into the “struggle to find happiness and accept life’s ending” following his diagnosis with incurable but manageable blood cancer, said Max Liu in the Financial Times. His musings are, at times, “unexpectedly funny” – like when he inherits an elderly Jack Russell which he “sometimes envies for being unaware of his own mortality (he ‘doesn’t even know he’s a dog’)”.

In this part “essay, memoir and story”, Barnes reflects on the “mysteries of love and sex amid erudite references to French culture and DIY eschatology”, said David Sexton in The Standard. It concludes “beautifully”, with the author “imagining sitting at a pavement cafe with his faithful reader, enjoying a drink, watching the world go by”.

Barnes tells us this is his “last book”, said Liu in the Financial Times. “Should we take this at face value?” While his blend of fact and fiction “could have been confusing” in the wrong hands, “Departure(s)” is both “enthralling” and “moving”. At just over 150 pages it’s a slim book but “each time I read it, I thought about it for days afterwards”. If this really is Barnes’ swansong, “he has given his career a triumphant ending”.

“Mike Lynch was the UK’s answer to the truculent titans of California’s Silicon Valley,” said Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. An “authentic tech genius turned billionaire”, he had many “rebarbative traits to match” – not least a tendency to bully staff.

Today, Lynch is known above all for the freak accident that ended his life in August 2024, 10 weeks after he was cleared of fraud by a court in San Francisco. As he celebrated with friends and family, his superyacht Bayesian was struck by a tornado, which toppled its 72-metre mast and drowned Lynch and six others, including his daughter Hannah.

Now Katie Prescott, a Times journalist, has written this engaging biography, which examines “with exemplary fairness and clarity” Lynch’s life and business dealings, along with his “terrible” end.

Born in 1965 in the “rough suburb” of Ilford, east London, Lynch was “blessed with brains, musical talent and drive”, said Charlie English in The Guardian. He earned a PhD in computing at Cambridge and in 1996 launched Autonomy, the software company that made him famous. Four years later, it floated on the London Stock Exchange with an “astonishing valuation of £4.1 billion”, and in 2011 was bought by Hewlett-Packard for an even more remarkable $11.7 billion.

As Prescott makes clear, these valuations were artificially inflated: Autonomy deployed various tricks to overstate its revenues – tricks, she suggests, that Lynch must have known about.

He emerges from her account as a “monstrous man in many ways”: a “fluent liar” who set out to create a “sinister corporate culture” (at one of his companies, meeting rooms were “named after Bond villains”). This is an “excellent, meticulously researched” biography of a “gifted”, flawed and – in the end – desperately unlucky man.

‘The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game’ by C. Thi Nguyen

C. Thi Nguyen loves games, said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. In his new book, the University of Utah philosophy professor puts himself out on “a long, creaking limb” by suggesting that much of human activity can be explained by two countervailing inclinations of the species: our tendency to gamify life’s purpose and our pursuit of freedom from that chase through, well, less consequential games. If you enjoy board games, fly fishing, or even recreational cooking, you probably appreciate the type of game that Nguyen endorses: an activity whose sometimes arbitrary rules enable us to play more freely and experience different aspects of ourselves. Nguyen worries, however, that our urge to quantify the value of our lives and achievements is soul-sucking, and his worries are less fun to read about than his paeans to play. He writes so beautifully about mastering the yo-yo, in fact, that I’d read a whole book on the subject and “would feel alive at the end.”

“The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry,” said Simon Ings in The Telegraph (U.K.). Nguyen is telling us that in our trying to make life more frictionless, our governments, businesses, and individuals too have created metrics that measure the wrong things. “The result is that our civic life has become superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral.” Nguyen mentions a pastor who neglects other needs of his congregation because he’s been told to meet a baptism quota, and The Score also prods us to consider how the ranking of universities discounts schools’ distinctive value systems, how the pursuit of individual wealth steals time from relationships, and how we’ve come to believe we’re healthy as long as each day we each log 10,000 steps. Nguyen’s cautionary tales can get repetitive, but he is forever leading readers toward a particular set of conclusions, and “if we truly want to understand our civic plight, we should read The Score.”

At the end of the book, Nguyen offers two possible scenarios for our future, said Stuart Jeffries in the Financial Times. In the “Cynical Sad One,” as he calls it, our values continue to be perverted by misleading metrics as tech companies and other businesses monetize such scoring. But because Nguyen is essentially “an upbeat, hopeful guy,” he throws his heart into a second potential outcome, “advocating a kind of playful rebellion against rules and metrics.” Being more cynical myself, “I suspect the evisceration of our values by scoring systems will continue,” as business interests outweigh human interests. “I would love to be proved wrong,” though, and in the meantime, “I give this excellent
book five stars.”

‘The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World’ by Tilar J. Mazzeo

“There is perhaps no more traditionally masculine literary genre than the seafaring tale,” said Jennifer Wright in The New York Times. “So it
is exciting to read Tilar J. Mazzeo’s The Sea Captain’s Wife,” an account
of how, in 1856, a Massachusetts woman named Mary Ann Patten became the first female captain of a merchant clipper ship while 19 and pregnant. When her husband, the ship’s captain, was stricken with
tubercular meningitis as the 216-foot triple master neared the world’s most dangerous ocean passage, Patten called upon the knowledge she’d accumulated over the previous two years to win the crew’s support. The mutinous first mate had already been shackled below deck when Patten seized command of Neptune’s Car, and Mazzeo
recounts the subsequent action “with a no-nonsense crispness that feels appropriately shipshape.”

“If this were fiction, throwing in a hurricane now would be a little over the edge,” said Bill Heavey in The Wall Street Journal. Yet that’s what happened to Neptune’s Car as it neared Cape Horn and the treacherous
waters separating South America from Antarctica. Patten was rare even in having been a woman on such a ship, and rarer still in having studied books in the ship’s library that taught her both how to treat injuries and how to navigate. When the storm hit, she chose to ride its winds wherever they took the ship, surviving 50-foot-waves and an obstacle course of 200-foot icebergs before putting the ship back on course for San Francisco. It’s “undeniably one of the greatest stories of a bygone era,” but because Mazzeo waits until her book’s second half to reach the action, “readers may find themselves skipping ahead.”

“Fortunately, Mazzeo is an engaging writer,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Her forays into clipper-ship engineering, the science of ocean charts, and the Pattens’ family history are “all necessary for understanding Mary Ann’s story,” and that story doesn’t end when Patten reaches San Francisco and the world celebrates her
achievement. Because Patten had to then fight to be paid the captain’s fee she’d richly earned, “this book will leave you alternately shivering, cheering, and seething.”

In a world full of distractions, it can be challenging to find the time to escape into literature, but it is never too late to get back to reading. The top of the new year is the perfect time to restart a good habit. Here are some tips for falling back in love with books.

Reread an old favorite

If you are out of practice, start with a book you enjoyed reading in the past, said Alan Jacobs, a professor of humanities at Baylor University and the author of “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction,” to The New York Times. Do not “feel sheepish about it.” Read the “same thing three times in a row if that gives you pleasure.”

Pick the right book

Once you get back into the habit of reading and you are ready to pick the next book, “avoid dense nonfiction or a 500-page doorstop,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Your first book should be “something that you think will be joyful,” said book blogger Jocelyn Luizzi to the Chronicle.

Everyone’s taste is different, so look to various places for recommendations, including “friends, booksellers and online communities" like BookTok, said the Chronicle. You should also try browsing your library’s shelves, or “ask your librarian,” said the New York Times. Libraries are “great places to find things that no algorithm would ever suggest to you,” Jacobs said to the Times. Libraries are “serendipity vendors.”

Create a reading routine

To create a long-lasting habit, “start by scheduling reading into your day,” Gloria Mark, an attention span expert with UC Irvine, said to the Chronicle. Start small by reading five pages before bed or during your work breaks, and gradually increase the amount of time you read. Create a distraction-free environment by avoiding your devices. Try finding a quiet reading spot, but do not be “afraid to make it a social activity.” Many cities host silent book clubs where “people read their own books together in coffee shops and libraries.”

Look for moments when you can “turn reading into a ritual,” said the Times. Try finding a cozy place and “pairing your pages with something else you enjoy, like a cup of tea.”

Experiment with other formats

There has always been debate about what counts as a book, but “experimenting with other formats can make reading more convenient,” said the Chronicle. E-books and Kindles are portable, and “audiobooks are a good candidate to accompany chores or the morning commute.” There is no reason to feel shame about opting for audiobooks, which have become increasingly popular. Experts say “listening is just another way to enjoy literature,” said the Times.

Feel free to skip a read

You do not have to “slog through an entire book just because you started it,” said the Times. Nancy Pearl, author of “Book Lust” and an award-winning librarian, coined the Rule of 50 to help determine when to abandon a book. If you are under 50, you should give a book about 50 pages before you quit. If you are older, you should subtract your age from 100 to see how many pages to sit through before skipping a book. Books are “not to be ‘gotten through,’” said Jacobs to the Times. They are “to be delighted in.”

In September 1781, a slave ship known as “the Zorg” set sail for Jamaica from Africa’s Gold Coast. Originally a Dutch vessel, the Zorg had been captured by a British captain and heavily overloaded with slaves. It left the Gold Coast with 442 Africans held captive below decks, and an inadequate crew of 17.

As Siddharth Kara relates in this harrowing but fascinating book, “the Zorg’s trans-Atlantic crossing plumbed the depths of human depravity”, said Amanda Brickell Bellows in The Wall Street Journal. Dysentery and scurvy ravaged the vessel, killing or incapacitating many on board. Supplies of food and water ran dangerously low.

Days from Jamaica, the crew of the Zorg “huddled together and devised a murderous plan”. Rather than arriving at their destination with scores of “dead or dying” (and therefore commercially useless) slaves, they decided to throw them overboard. In total, “more than 123 captive men, women and children” were disposed of in this way.

Kara argues that this “unspeakable plan of action” was driven by “economic greed”, said Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. While maritime insurance didn’t cover the deaths of slaves from natural causes, it was possible to claim for slaves thrown overboard, by portraying them as “jettisoned” cargo. And sure enough, the ship’s Liverpudlian owner duly filed a claim for the lost slaves, and then, in 1783, took the insurers to court when they refused to pay.

Kara suggests that the resulting “public exposure of the Zorg murders” helped kick-start the anti-slavery movement – which led, ultimately, to the passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. Blending “powerful storytelling” with meticulous research, “The Zorg” “effectively illuminates one of the darkest chapters in our history”.

It is indeed a “shameful” story, and Kara has undertaken a “vast amount of research”, said David Mills in The Times. It’s a pity, then, that his book is “clumsily constructed and badly written”. Moreover, his shaky grasp of nautical matters (no sail is “fastened by a shroud”, they are for masts) makes it “difficult to have faith in the veracity of his colour”.

I have some reservations about “The Zorg”, said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. But it offers deeply researched and “wrenchingly vivid” portraits of the slave trade – including the horrific conditions in the slave-trading forts on the Gold Coast. As such, it “takes a respected place within a growing historical literature about the slave ship”. It is a “book of great importance”, which is likely to “become a classic”.

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The new year means the kickoff of a season with highly anticipated book releases. In January, readers can look forward to several promising projects, including a clever take on a literary staple, a peek into the world of homeschoolers and former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy’s fiction debut.

‘Call Me Ishmaelle’ by Xiaolu Guo

One of this year’s most anticipated releases is a feminist reimagining of the literary classic “Moby Dick.” National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Xiaolu Guo recasts Ishmael as a 17-year-old girl disguised as a cabin boy and Ahab as a Black freedman named Seneca, haunted by his father’s legacy of enslavement.

Ishmaelle joins Captain Seneca’s crew as he hunts the white whale that took his leg. Guo “dispenses with the digressions on whaling that thickened Melville’s novel,” making this version “more propulsive and immediate,” said Kirkus Reviews. She “blends in her own rhetorical tweaks,” shifting to the “mad, complex voices of Seneca and, at times, the whales themselves.” (out now, $18, Grove Atlantic, Amazon)

‘Homeschooled: A Memoir’ by Stefan Merrill Block

Novelist Stefan Merrill Block recounts the five years he spent largely on his own while homeschooled in his new “absorbing” memoir, The Washington Post said. Isolated from his peers and “virtually abandoned by the adults who might have intervened,” Block “moldered behind closed doors with only his unraveling mother for company.”

Block does muse about why there was so little oversight under a 1987 Texas court ruling that legalized homeschooling, but his book is “less an indictment of homeschooling in general than a vivid portrait of the way the practice failed one child in particular.” He does briefly reference the “regulatory vacuum” while writing with the “phenomenological precision and narrative verve of a novelist.” (out now, $30, Harper Collins Publishers, Amazon)

‘Anatomy of an Alibi’ by Ashley Elston

With a screen adaptation of her last hit novel on the horizon, Ashley Elston returns with a “new twisty crime novel,” Book Riot said. Protagonist Camille enlists the help of a woman who resembles her, Aubrey, to try to catch her husband Ben’s misbehavior so she can escape the marriage. However, when Ben winds up dead, only one of the two women has an airtight alibi. (Jan. 13, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Half His Age’ by Jennette McCurdy

Former child star Jennette McCurdy’s provocative debut novel follows Waldo, a “naive, lonely impulsive teenager” who sets her sights on her married creative writing teacher, said the Booklist Queen. Her obsession with her middle-aged teacher drives Waldo to “go to any lengths and try to overcome any obstacles to get what she wants.”

Writing the novel has been the most “creatively fulfilling experience of my life,” McCurdy said in a statement, per Variety. Through Waldo, she explores the “complexities of desire, consumerism, class, loneliness, the internet, rage, addiction and the (oftentimes misguided) lengths we’ll go to in order to get what we want.” (Jan. 20, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief’ by T. Kingfisher

Acclaimed fantasy horror writer T. Kingfisher is rereleasing her previously self-published 2013 novella, “Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief.” An early example of cozy fantasy that debuted before the genre became as popular as it is today, “Nine Goblins” tells the story of the Nineteenth Infantry of the Goblin Army as it fights to make its way home amid an ongoing war with elves and humans. Kingfisher’s “trademark humor is on full display,” said Publishers’ Weekly. Fans will “have fun delving into the archive.” (Jan. 20, $25, Macmillan Publishers, Amazon)

These are the top culinary reads of the year, from a celebration of Middle Eastern food to an immersive tour of Paris’s 20 arrondissements.

How I Cook by Ben Lippett

Ben Lippett – the author of this superbly practical cookbook – “reminds me of the early Nigel Slater”, said Rose Prince in The Spectator. His recipes sound simple – sausage and sage pappardelle, chocolate mousse – but they’re always clever and well explained. A food influencer, Lippett has a “blokeish gen-Z prose style”, said Bee Wilson in The Guardian. I wasn’t sure, at first, if I was the target audience. But as my copy, now covered in Post-it Notes, attests, I “became a true believer”.

Lugma by Noor Murad

This first solo book by a former member of the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen is a “vibrant, wholehearted celebration of the food of the Middle East” said Mark Diacono in Delicious. From coffee, cardamom and chipotle-rubbed lamb chops to burnt aubergines with fenugreek sauce, tahini and fried shallots, Murad’s recipes are highly appealing. With its title meaning bite or mouthful in Arabic, “Lugma” is “immersive and transporting”, said Chris Morocco on Bon Appétit.

All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh

This book is that rare thing, said Harriet Fitch Little in the Financial Times: a work that “pays serious attention to the pop-culture side of food”. In charmingly written essays, Tandoh explores how “the internet remade recipe writing”, and “why bubble tea went global”. Her writing blends an appealing “chumminess” with “intellectual acuity and cultural literacy”, said Sarah Moss in The Observer. The result is a “joyous blend of curiosity, intelligence and generosity”.

Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens

Winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Award for debut food writers, this book offers a culinary tour of Paris’s 20 arrondissements, said Harriet Fitch Little. Each chapter centres on a “representative dish” from one: “cordon bleu-style ratatouille in the 15th, Breton crêpes in the 14th, bánh mì in the 13th”. An ode to the city’s food and people, “Moveable Feasts” is “thoroughly entertaining (and seriously hunger-inducing)”, said Ceci Browning in The Times.

The Christmas Companion by Skye McAlpine

This “sumptuous” festive cookbook features lots of great treats the time-rich could make, but it’s “the vegetable section that stuns”, said Rose Prince. If you struggle to get beyond sprouts and red cabbage, McAlpine will inspire you with her beetroot, maple syrup, feta and walnut salad, or her savoy cabbage with pancetta, chestnuts and gorgonzola. “Think of it as a Delia-style bible”, said Tony Turnbull in The Times, “with extra party planning and more sparkle”.

Indian Kitchens by Roopa Gulati

Gulati’s books are always “rich and rewarding”, said Mark Diacono, “and her latest is no exception”. Based on her travels through six Indian regions, it contains more than 100 recipes, both her own and those of “12 home cooks” she encounters along the way. Gulati “conjures up a world in which people think nothing of rolling their own flatbreads and making their own yoghurt”, said Bee Wilson. The result is a “remarkable” portrait of the “reality of everyday kitchen life in India”.

Boustany by Sami Tamimi

A celebration of Palestinian food, by one of the founders of Ottolenghi, this book is full of inviting vegetarian recipes, said Mark Diacono – from red lentil, dried mint and lemon soup to pan-baked tahini, halva and coffee brownies. “Boustany” was “born out of the homesickness” Tamimi experienced during lockdown, said Tony Turnbull. Now, of course, the book has a “far greater resonance”. It’s a work of “soul and yearning” that’s also bursting with “delicious things to eat”.

Baking & the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh

This book, by psychologist-cum-baker Goh, is full of “precise yet creative recipes”, said Bee Wilson. “The Shoo Fly buns are the currant buns of dreams”; “I wanted to make the chocolate financiers with rosemary and hazelnuts so much that I bought a financier tin specially”. I’d go for the caramelised cinnamon doughnut cake or the “Lao Gan Ma” cheese biscuits, said Rose Prince: “both are amazingly good”.

Padella by Tim Siadatan

As the “perma-queues outside his restaurant in London, Padella, show only too well”, Tim Siadatan “knows what people want”, said Tony Turnbull. And in this superb book, the “master” pasta-maker reveals the tricks and techniques that make his dishes, such as tagliarini with crab and chilli, or lasagne made with slow-cooked veal shin, so irresistible. “I might skip the calf’s brain with morels and rosemary butter, but it shows what a completist Siadatan is.”

Winter is high cooking time. Some days, you will simply not want to leave the house while nonetheless craving, say, a steamy impromptu hot pot. Other days, you might ache to crank that oven dial and bake yourself a tray of brownies. These eight cookbooks are happy to help you on your wintry journeys.

‘All That Crumbs Allow’

Oh, the allure of a single-subject cookbook that’s fun and frugal. Authors Michelle Marek and Camilla Wynne have assembled an homage to economy and that most versatile of ingredients: breadcrumbs. Savory bread dumplings, two pastas made with breadcrumbs, a pumpernickel Black forest torte, a breadcrumb omelet, and a toast-and-jam semifreddo — this is thrift as joyful hedonism. (out now, $27.50, Kitchen Arts & Letters)

‘The King Cookbook’

Dining at King, a shimmering corner restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, warps time and space, planting you firmly in some parallel-minded part of France or Italy. Now, with the publication of “The King Cookbook,” the restaurant’s owners, ​​Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi, teach you how to emulate King’s breezy, precise cooking at home. Time to stock up on those salted Italian anchovies, high-quality olive oil, crème fraîche, preserved tomatoes, lemons, and so very many kinds of dried beans. (out now, $40, Macmillan, Amazon)

‘Wine Pairing for the People: The Communion of Wine, Food and Culture from Africa and Beyond’

Eurocentric, schmeurocentric. Cha McCoy is here to prove to you the obvious, and mercilessly overlooked, actuality that food from all across the globe can go well with wine. “Wine Pairing for the People” spans five regions of the world: Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the U.S. and Asia. As McCoy bops from Turkey to Somalia to the Deep South, the land of barbecue and Creole cooking, the certified sommelier reveals all the ways that wine can complement so many kinds of foods prepared so many ways. Mexican tamales with Sardinian vermentino, anyone?(out now, $35, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘The Nonalcoholic Bar: Classic and Creative Cocktails for Everyone’

Let’s begin with the seemingly impossible: a booze-free martini. Author John deBary sets the optimal tone straightaway with a refrigerator martini that combines nonalcoholic gin and vermouth with olive brine, hot sauce and orange bitters. It emulates rather than replicates that boozy version and does so with aplomb. That’s the entire vibe of “The Nonalcoholic Bar,” right down to a footloose simulacrum of a Ramos gin fizz, reconsidered with blood orange juice and Sanbittèr soda. (Jan. 6, $20, Union Square & Co., Amazon)

‘Everyone Hot Pot: Creating the Ultimate Meal for Gathering and Feasting’

Natasha Pickowicz, baker extraordinaire, taps into her Chinese heritage with her second cookbook. But this is no slavish homage to authentic hot pot. Sure, there’s mushroom dashi and appetite-whetting cucumber stumps slapped with rice wine vinegar and soy sauce. There is also a charred, candied orange sauce and a chapter on blowout seafood-feast hot pots. Pickowicz is always about bringing people together. This time, she’s doing it while hot to pot. (Jan. 27, $30, Artisan, Amazon)

‘Simply Donabe: Japanese One-Pot Recipes’

A donabe is a Japanese earthenware pot. It’s also the name of a style of one-pot dishes. Naoko Moore walks you through cooking an array of dishes in these beautiful, utilitarian vessels, including miso ramen, shabu shabu, crumbled tofu with carrots and edamame, and matcha tiramisu — one container, so many possibilities. (Feb. 10, $40, Amazon)

‘Bittersweet: The Five Tastes of Dessert and Beyond’

Sweetness without ballast fizzles. Thalia Ho knows this and has written a baking book that pinpoints the delicious interplay between sweet and the other five tastes. A few telling examples: miso in a caramel apple pie, soy sauce in ganache brownies, and torched sherbet meringues. Your sweet tooth will never know what hit it, nor will it want to go back to before “Bittersweet.” (Feb. 10, $35, Harvest, Amazon)

‘Obsessed with the Best: 100+ Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20+ Head-to-Head Tests’

First things first: The “best” doesn’t exist. Still, a recipe adventure seeking to compare, contrast and comprehend how to think about different iterations of the same dish is a noble endeavor. In “Obsessed with the Best,” Ella Quittner runs recipes like scrambled eggs, meatballs, latkes, fresh pasta, yellow cake and even whipped cream through trial-and-error experiments. You are sure to encounter solid results and a fun read, even if Quittner’s best is simply quantitative opinion. (Feb. 24, $40, HarperCollins, Amazon)

It was a banner year for literature, with a plethora of intriguing and memorable releases. The publishing world delivered boundary-pushing fiction alongside heavily researched and introspective nonfiction in 2025. Here are the best books of the year — ones that stood out among a host of excellent tomes.

‘A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children’ by Haley Cohen Gilliland

Journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland’s debut tackles the story of Argentina’s Dirty War through the lens of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a “courageous group of women who, since 1977, have worked tirelessly to locate the country’s stolen children and grandchildren,” said Time. The book primarily focuses on one woman, Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, and her “unwavering fight to find her missing grandson.”

Her battle for justice alongside the other Abuelas would “put them at odds with Argentina’s government” and lead to the “emergence of important new DNA science, which would result in the identification of 140 children who were kidnapped by the state.” Exhilarating, “emotional and exhaustively researched,” Gilliland’s book is a “testament to those grandmothers who never gave up” and a “heart-wrenching reminder that their work is far from over.” ($30, Simon and Schuster, Amazon)

‘Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts’ by Margaret Atwood

The renowned author, best known for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” tells her life story in this “full, expansive and joyful” memoir, said The Washington Post. In it, Atwood describes her life as “radically unproscribed, prolific and hearty.” The book highlights the author’s “energy, generosity, focus and vigor,” as well as her “Canadian modesty, self-deprecation and good cheer.” Fans of hers will love the book, and for aspiring authors, it will “offer a model of productivity.” ($35, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’ by Stephen Graham Jones

This horror and historical fiction mashup is a “weirdly satisfying and bloody reckoning with some of America’s most shameful history,” Kirkus Review. In this vampire western, Stephen Graham Jones weaves a “rich tapestry that winds around questions of identity, heritage and historical truth,” based on a “real historical atrocity,” the Marias Massacre, in which nearly 200 Native people were killed by the U.S. Army in 1870.

The pacing is surprisingly slow for a “tale with a truly visceral amount of carnage.” Nevertheless, “by the time the book winds back around,” it is as much an “autopsy of institutionalized treachery” as a “demonization of its tragic and terrifying ‘villain.’” ($30, Simon and Schuster, Amazon)

‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones

Toni Morrison acquired and initially published this African American novelist’s manuscript in 1984. Once deemed a promising new author, Jones largely disappeared from the literary scene after releasing her second, and last, book in 1989.

This year, her debut was finally rereleased. "Fish Tales" is a “burst of authentic energy, a rush of life from start to finish,” said the Chicago Review of Books. The novel follows the protagonist, Lewis Jones, as she navigates 1970s New York and Detroit, in a tale marked by a string of lovers from her youth into her late thirties. Hers is a “unique adventure, unafraid to display the grittiness and brutal ecstasy of a life of fast liaisons.”

Though the book was dismissed initially as smut, the novel is “about far more than the enjoyment of sex;” it is about “sadness and pain that cannot be erased by bright city lights.” It is a story of “trauma, confusion, lost souls” and a “wrathful love that may never know peace.” ($27, Macmillan, Amazon)

‘Katabasis’ by R.F. Kuang

“Yellowface” author R.F. Kuang turns her critical eye from the publishing world to academia, with an added twist of fantasy in her latest novel. The story follows Alice Law as she journeys through hell to secure a recommendation from her fallen mentor, Cambridge professor Jacob Grimes, widely regarded as the greatest magician in the world.

That “Katabasis” is a “fun, engaging novel is clear from the start," said NPR. What makes this novel shine is “the way it is happy being goofy, playful and campy,” but then “doesn’t shy away from being deep, smart, well-researched, innovative and surefooted” as it “pulls readers into a new magic system.” Kuang is “in control at all times,” and the “ease with which she navigates between the silly and the sublime is just one of the reasons she is one of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.” ($36, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church’ by Kevin Sack

“Mother Emanuel” is a “masterpiece” that tells the story of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which is sadly now best known as the site of a mass shooting by a white supremacist that killed nine congregants on June 17, 2015, said The New York Times. Former Times reporter Kevin Sack delivers a “dense, rich, captivating narrative,” featuring “vivid prose, prodigious research and a palpable emotional engagement that is disciplined by a meticulous attention to the facts.”

Over the course of a decade, he consulted a collection of scholarly sources and primary texts, and interviewed scores of Emanuel’s congregants, historians and theologians. The book’s pages “teem with information” often “eloquently conveyed,” leaving his readers “as enthralled as he is with his expansive, inspiring and hugely important subject.” ($35, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood

This highly acclaimed book from Australian novelist Charlotte Wood was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize before making its stateside debut earlier this year. The story follows a burnt-out, unnamed narrator as she seeks refuge at a cloistered convent in rural Australia.

She is forced to reckon with her past through the lens of three key events: a mouse plague, the discovery of a nun's skeletal remains and a visit from a celebrity activist nun. The surrounding apocalypse is “not so much the plot of the book as its anchor,” grounding the novel’s “ruminations on forgiveness and regret, on how to live and die, if not virtuously, then as harmlessly as possible,” said The New York Times. Wood offers readers a “wise, consoling novel for disquieting times,” said Kirkus Review. ($19, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘What We Can Know’ by Ian McEwan

In his latest novel, Ian McEwan takes readers to the year 2119, where the “humanities are still in crisis,” said The New Yorker. The literary detective story combines science fiction with elements of a thriller as the protagonist, scholar Thomas Metcalfe, investigates a mysterious poem from 2014.

Much of the novel’s charm “lies in its re-creation of our era as seen from the future.” The book feels like “a direct descendant of ‘Atonement,’” McEwan’s “most beloved work.” The new book suggests that “human beings have always been declinist, underselling the riches of the present and romanticizing what earlier generations merely made do with.” ($30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

Sales of non-fiction books have tumbled by 8.4% by volume – nearly double the dip seen in fiction paperback sales – between last summer and this.

Overall, the total value of sales in the sector declined by 4.7%, and of the 18 non-fiction subcategories, 14 have contracted, according to a recent report by NielsenIQ. While there have been some “notable exceptions”, authors of factual books are “feeling the pinch”, said The Guardian.

‘Not-so-pretty’ sales

It was a “not-so-pretty summer for non-fiction titles”, said The Bookseller. The “biggest drop” came in the food and drink category, which saw sales plummet by a quarter. And while biographies and autobiographies enjoyed a 2% boost to sales year-on-year, there was a “large disparity” between the highest-selling titles in the category. In 2024 Rory Stewart’s “Politics on the Edge” topped the chart with 108,227 copies sold, while this year’s bestseller, Chloe Dalton’s “Raising Hare” sold just 56,349.

Bright spots came in religion and humour, and in the trivia and puzzles category. They saw volume sales climb by 15.6% and 12.6% respectively, “though both come from a small base, with the latter’s sales just edging above 500,000 units”.

G.T. Karber’s “Murdle” was the only non-fiction book to sell more than half a million copies in the last two years, and “remained the biggest selling puzzle title across June, July and August this year”, despite sales plunging by 38.5% year-on-year.

‘Refuge rather than clarity’

Prior to the pandemic, non-fiction seemed “unstoppable”, said The Guardian. Readers devoured books to help make sense of political and social issues, from Brexit to the #MeToo movement. Titles like “Invisible Women” and “Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race” soared up the bestseller lists.

So what’s gone wrong? “Escapism” is the word that crops up repeatedly. “The world is exhausting, so readers are seeking refuge rather than clarity. Some are disillusioned; the voracious reading of the past decade didn’t transform the world as many hoped.” Instead, the NielsenIQ report reveals readers are turning to crime novels, science fiction and romantasy, spurred on by the thriving BookTok community on TikTok.

Some authors believe the issue is one of supply rather than demand. “Are we simply publishing less high-quality non-fiction?” One author told The Guardian that risk-averse publishers are commissioning books because of the number of followers a writer has “rather than ideas”.

At the same time, non-fiction is competing with a “glut of free – and often excellent – information elsewhere” from online video essays to podcasts. “Why spend £15 on a book about one issue when a few podcasts can explain it on your commute?” Indeed, audiobook sales are booming, with non-fiction purchases almost doubling in the last five years.

And while overall non-fiction print sales are down, there has been a “surge” in pop psychology self-help books, like this year’s runaway bestseller “The Let Them Theory”, by Mel Robbins. As the political and social climate gets more turbulent, it seems readers are turning to “personal betterment”.

It’s important not to view non-fiction as a single entity. “Nobody talked about the decline of non-fiction the year Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’ was published,” Caroline Sanderson, associate editor at The Bookseller, told The Guardian. “The success of one book can change the whole picture.”

‘Capitalism: A Global History’ by Sven Beckert

“Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story,” said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s “vivid” new 1,300- page survey “delivers on that promise,” challenging earlier histories that have treated the singularly omnivorous and fecund economic system as primarily a European invention. Beckert gives the definition of capitalism as “a process in which economic life is fundamentally driven by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital,” and his global view of the phenomenon “reveals its protean character.” Not everyone will accept his analysis, but for decades to come, “readers will study this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance.”

Although Capitalism “occasionally lapses into a textbook tone,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe, “each chapter offers an abundance of characters and arguments.” Beckert presents 12th-century Aden as a hot spot of trade that was one of many in a network that for centuries supported a kind of proto-capitalism spread thinly around the globe. In those years, Asia and the Islamic caliphate dominated, but Europe embraced capitalism when the continent’s feudal system collapsed, and capitalism supported by the muscle of the state soon showed its appetite for exploiting the labor and resources of distant lands. By the 18th century, the British had turned Barbados into a model of the economy capitalists aspired to build, at least according to Beckert’s dark view. Because markets had become the sole arbiter of human affairs, tens of thousands of African slaves worked the island’s plantations, funneling profits to just 74 landowners.

Because Beckert’s definition of capitalism is so elastic, said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker, “the suspicion grows that we’ve been sold a story without a subject.” Or worse, he’s made capitalism synonymous with humans’ acquisitive instinct, a definition broad enough for him to blame capitalism for all the world’s evils, from racism and sexism to insomnia and frustrating dating apps. The idea that capitalism’s advance is driven by wealthy actors’ desire to increase their capital also doesn’t jibe with the reality we all see, said John Kay in the Financial Times. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos made their fortunes by innovating, not by exploiting wealth they already held. But Beckert doesn’t have to be 100% right to have performed a valuable service. “Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know,” and while some readers may complain that Capitalism spreads too wide a net, “others, including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship.

‘American Canto’ by Olivia Nuzzi

Olivia Nuzzi’s new memoir could have launched a career comeback, said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Instead, “historians will study how bad this book is.” It’s “illegible in ways you can’t imagine.” Nuzzi, 32, was a star political reporter until last year, when allegations arose that she’d had an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after profiling the then 69-year-old politician during his campaign for president. But her much-hyped book turns out to be 300 pages of rambling that offer no insight on herself or Kennedy, who’s now the nation’s vaccine-killing secretary of health and human services. While Nuzzi does declare that an affair of a sort did occur, despite Kennedy’s denial, details are scant. In fact, American Canto is “mostly about how compelling Nuzzi thinks it is to be a blond white woman in journalism.”

The book isn’t uniformly terrible, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. While at New York magazine, Nuzzi became a star because she wrote with flair, and about a third of her stream-of-consciousness account consists of “piquantly observed” political vignettes, including many about President Trump. But large swaths of American Canto are “aggressively awful,” featuring “ostentatiously mannered” prose that reads like a poor Joan Didion imitation. Gratingly, she refers to Kennedy only as “the Politician.” And while she devotes plenty of space to musings about the California wildfires she witnessed after New York cut ties with her, “the gossip that is ostensibly this book’s chief selling point is scarcely in evidence.”

“At its best, American Canto is about a crack-up,” said Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Trump, Kennedy, and other MAGA luminaries regularly abuse the truth, and any of us forced to spend as much time with them as Nuzzi has, “might end up severed from reality.” I briefly felt for Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, fellow journalist Ryan Lizza, when he alleged in a recent series of Substack posts that Nuzzi had cheated on him earlier with Mark Sanford, another failed presidential candidate. Still, none of Nuzzi’s own bids for sympathy can disguise “the central problem with American Canto: It contains “no real, believable regret,” even when Nuzzi admits that Kennedy badly used her.

‘Has the world really lost its thirst for Scotch whiskey?’

James Moore at The Independent

Scotch is “one of Scotland’s most iconic products,” but “it is not in a happy place,” says James Moore. Scotch distillers have been “caught in a perfect storm, with taxes and tariffs battering both domestic and international consumption.” The “real enthusiasts may choose to swallow higher prices. But casual drinkers? That’s a different matter altogether.” Those “involved in producing Scotch could be forgiven for pouring themselves a stiff drink to help drown their sorrows.”

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‘The Sydney Hanukkah attack didn’t come out of nowhere’

Aviva Klompas at Newsweek

The “Jewish families who gathered at Bondi Beach in Sydney to celebrate Hanukkah were targeted for doing exactly what the holiday represents: showing up openly as Jews,” says Aviva Klompas. They were “not caught in a geopolitical dispute.” This “was not the result of a policy disagreement or a misunderstanding about Israel.” The attack was “also not sudden or inexplicable. It was the foreseeable result of a sustained failure to take antisemitism seriously before it turned lethal.”

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‘Olivia Nuzzi, Karine Jean-Pierre and Eric Trump have all written the same book’

Carlos Lozada at The New York Times

Political memoirs “tend to fall into recognizable categories,” says Carlos Lozada. A “recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir.” The books of Eric Trump, Karine Jean-Pierre and Olivia Nuzzi are “all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies.” They are “animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces.”

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‘Will Ford’s $19.5 billion EV charge be another dead end?’

Liam Denning at Bloomberg

For “years after General Motors took a bailout from Washington, it was scorned in some quarters of the population as ‘Government Motors,’” and while “Ford Motor Co. lacks the requisite initials, the same epithet could be applied to its latest pivot on electric vehicles,” says Liam Denning. Ford is “reconfiguring for changed political realities given that the environmental benefits of EVs, lower emissions, aren’t rewarded in the market but instead incented by regulation.” But Ford “isn’t an innocent bystander.”

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