When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Agatha Christie is widely regarded as the Queen of Mystery, and her books are so beloved that she is second only to Shakespeare as the bestselling author of all time. Embrace your inner Hercule Poirot with the most intriguing mysteries in Christie’s catalog.

‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ (1926)

“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” is only the third novel with Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and showcases a “masterful use of narration and sleight of hand,” said Book Riot. “Both detective and author” are at the “height of their powers,” said The New York Times. ($11, Signet Classics, Amazon)

‘Murder on the Orient Express’ (1934)

In one of the most famous Poirot novels, the mustachioed wunderkind becomes snowbound on a luxury train, and a man is murdered on board, creating a baffling “locked-room” mystery. Christie provides “enough lovely detail of place” to make her novel as “atmospheric as it is ingenious,” said Forbes. ($19, William Morrow, Amazon)

‘The ABC Murders’ (1936)

Like many other Poirot books, this one is “narrated in part by his old friend Captain Hastings,” who is a “bit of a dolt — a classic unreliable narrator,” said The New York Times. “The ABC Murders” is one of the “first times Christie dabbled in criminal psychology, with fantastic results.” ($19, William Morrow, Amazon)

‘And Then There Were None’ (1939)

This classic is perfect for fans of “isolated settings with a murderer on the loose,” said Reader’s Digest, and is Christie’s bestselling novel and one of her favorites, according to a list she wrote to a Japanese fan in 1972. Chances are “you’ve heard of this masterpiece” even if “you’ve never read the book.” ($20, William Morrow, Amazon)

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Romantasy may be a relatively new publishing category, but it has become mighty popular mighty quickly, and true fans know the combination of romance and magic has long titillated readers. These books offer the perfect starting point for anyone seeking an introduction to the steamiest among them.

‘Angels’ Blood’ by Nalini Singh (2009)

Nalini Singh kicked off the “Guild Hunter” series in the late 2000s, “before the term romantasy entered the lexicon,” said Harper’s Bazaar. In Singh’s world, angels, humans and vampires become intertwined in steamy, action-packed ways. The first book follows Elena Deveraux, a vampire hunter hired by the “very hot, very powerful” Archangel Raphael. ($9, Berkley, Amazon)

‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ by Sarah J. Maas (2015)

Sarah J. Maas reigns as the “queen of fairy smut,” as “some fans lovingly call her,” said The New York Times. She was the United States’ bestselling author in 2024. Part of the romantasy genre’s runaway success came courtesy of her blockbuster “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series, filled with “magical creatures, ancient curses, warring royal courts” and “smoking-hot fairies” who can’t resist each other. ($19, Bloomsbury, Amazon)

‘Fourth Wing’ by Rebecca Yarros (2023)

Rebecca Yarros is a BookTok heavy hitter, captivating fans with the romantic flings of dragon riders in “The Empyrean” books. Even the most “dragon-averse” will “fall head over heels” for this series, which is “just as spicy as it is thrilling,” said Cosmopolitan. ($15, Red Tower Books, Amazon)

‘Quicksilver’ by Callie Hart (2024)

Callie Hart’s “Fae and Alchemy” series is relatively new to the romantasy scene, but she’s already got fans ravenous for more fairy romance. Although it was published two years ago, the bestseller ranked among Goodreads’ most-read books of 2026. The recognition “underscores just how quickly” the novel has become “one of the biggest breakout hits in contemporary fiction,” said Parade. ($10, Grand Central Publishing, Amazon)

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Hungarian British author David Szalay’s acclaimed novels include All That Man Is and Turbulence. His most recent book, Flesh, now out in paperback, won last year’s Booker Prize and follows the rags-to-riches trajectory of an impulsive Hungarian man.

‘The Diary of Samuel Pepys’ (1660–69)

Picking this up to read a single short entry, I can easily get stuck with it for an hour. As fascinating as the differences between our world and the world of the 1660s are the similarities. And the man himself? He’s just very human, and massively engaging in the perfect frankness he brings to his endeavor. Buy it here.

‘Lord Jim’ by Joseph Conrad (1900)

Conrad’s Marlow might be the first appearance of a pervasive 20th-century type: world-weary, disillusioned, and discouraged by what he has seen of humanity, but somehow still fundamentally humane. It is this perspective that makes the novel so morally modern and therefore so full of urgent interest, even now, well over a century after it was written. Buy it here.

‘As I Lay Dying’ by William Faulkner (1930)

The device of having chapters offering different points of view on some situation has become perhaps overfamiliar. In what might be its original iteration here, though, it feels fresh and powerful. Particularly when combined with the way Faulkner ventriloquizes the rough language of his characters, while giving them a sort of Homeric grandeur in their closeness to the essential experiences of human life. Buy it here.

‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang (2007)

The three segments of this novel interact in powerful but mysterious ways. Its impact is unquestionable, but its meaning (something to do with physicality) is ultimately impossible to pin down— which is perhaps as it should be. Buy it here.

‘The Largesse of the Sea Maiden’ by Denis Johnson (2018)

With the naturalness of someone talking, stories flow into one another, or merge, or divide. The comedy is deeply humane. The prose is a constant delight. The profundity sneaks up on you. Buy it here.

‘Alphabetical Diaries’ by Sheila Heti (2024)

A sort of cubist work of autofiction, which I hope makes it sound intriguing rather than impenetrable. Heti took years’ worth of personal diaries, got a computer to arrange the sentences in alphabetical order, and then, without tampering with the order, winnowed the material to the length of a novella. The result is unique and mesmerizing. Buy it here.

‘The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World’ by Nathaniel Philbrick

“The Gold Rush is a fascinating saga, especially in the hands of so capable a chronicler as Nathaniel Philbrick,” said Richard Snow in The Wall Street Journal. The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and three George Washington books turns his gaze to the prospecting dash—second only to the Civil War as the defining event of 19th-century America. It all began in 1848, when carpenter James Marshall noticed something sparkly in the channel below the California sawmill he was building. By the following year, more than 50,000 fortune seekers from every continent had arrived, hunting the flakes, nuggets, and veins of gold spread along 150 miles of the Sierra Nevada. Philbrick chooses “as our inaugural guide to gold country” one Vicente Rosales, a highhearted Chilean who kept observant diaries of the madness he witnessed as he sought his own fortune, if unsuccessfully.

Philbrick’s “engrossing” tale recounts “the birth of California, and the way gold and greed remade the nation,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. The influx of prospectors and those profiting off them spawned cities including San Francisco and Sacramento, and, by 1850, California, newly taken from Mexico, had joined the union. The battle for the heart of the new state is reflected in its two maiden senators. Staunch slavery opponent John Frémont duked it out with William Gwin, a former plantation owner who sought to cleave off Southern California as its own slave state. Conjuring “time and place in lush detail,” Philbrick “grounds California’s fractious debates in human stories,” including those of Samuel Brannan, the con man who co-founded Sacramento; the murderous judge David Terry; and Native women victimized within their own homeland. And the author “spins his tale with aplomb, hitting his notes just so.

The Rush is “a sprawling book, characters and stories spilling out everywhere, as dense with claims as the goldfields it describes,” said Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker. Woven throughout are two dominant ideas: The scramble for wealth, labor, land, and power contributed to the onset of the Civil War, and the rush birthed a new, distinctly American taste for novelty and transformation that still informs our character. Sadly, Philbrick is “not particularly convincing about either of these claims,” which are “a little rickety” and “too different to comfortably coexist in a single book.” The Rush is “at its best when it simply shows us this mayhem as it unfolded in a specific place and period,” not when using it to illuminate the present. After all, “the past is its own kind of gold— abundant, difficult to access, inordinately valuable—and sometimes it is enough to let it shine.”

‘Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row’ by Lawrence Wright

“Here’s a cheery subject for a book,” said Timothy Egan in The New York Times. Redemption explores what happens when a group of nuns ministers to seven women on death row outside Waco, Texas, many of them convicted of unspeakable crimes. And yet in the hands of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear, “this tale is oddly compelling, even, dare I say, uplifting.” At first, it’s hard to feel sympathy for inmates whose alleged crimes include the murder of a toddler. But what elevates Wright’s “latest master class in narrative nonfiction” is how he finds “nuance behind the notoriety,” forcing us to question the looming execution of women who may be innocent or have at least changed for the better.

Wright “explores not just their gruesome crimes but their horrific backstories,” said Julia M. Klein in the Los Angeles Times. Most were victims of violence and sexual abuse; many succumbed to drug addiction and lived in poverty. Given “extraordinary access,” the author recounts how visits from the Sisters of Mary Morning Star instilled in them a sense of community, spirituality, and creative potential. Throughout, Wright “interrogates the boundary between severe mental illness and evil, and wonders whether, even in extreme cases, redemption might be possible.” Still, in expanding a 2025 New Yorker article to book length, he “sometimes loses the thread, indulging in digressions that detract from his study of transformation and redemption.”

This “may be Wright’s most personal work of journalism,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. He grew up worshipping at a Methodist church in Dallas, but he saw early on how religious fervor could stoke political extremism. Redemption’s “most revealing” parts find him exploring his and America’s relationships with the death penalty, which, one law professor tells him, wouldn’t exist here without Christians’ support. Wright says he’s not attempting to solve capital punishment’s moral dilemmas. But having absorbed his “richly observed and beautifully rendered” profiles of these inmates and nuns, “it’s difficult to imagine any reader’s faith or support of the death penalty could withstand the evidence his reporting so eloquently illustrates.

M. John Harrison has supplanted Margaret Atwood to become the oldest winner of the Booker Prize, scooping the prestigious award for “The End of Everything”.

The 81-year-old English author won the £50,000 prize for a post-apocalyptic novel that has divided opinion. The judges’ chair, Mary Beard, called it a “challenging read”.

But while previous Booker winners have dabbled in the tropes of science fiction, Harrison is the first to have “emerged from the bona fide SF world”, said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. It is “a historic win”.

‘A genre-defying writer’

“The End of Everything” is set in “a semi-gentrified seaside art town” on the south coast of England and in a near-future that has seen the arrival of a mysterious race of aliens called the iGhetti, said The Times.

The narrative follows Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber, who fishes a strange creature out of the sea and decides to go on the run with it, along with his elderly aunt, Marnie. The “outlandish developments” of the plot are told in “prose of deadpan precision”, while the “origins, motives and even physical existence” of the iGhetti remain mysterious, as does the nature of the disaster that has caused society to collapse.

Harrison said he “deliberately omitted” as much explanation as possible, said the BBC, so readers feel “the same disorientation as the characters”.

He has been called “the titan of literary science fiction”, but Harrison “dislikes labels like science fiction and fantasy”. He is “a genre-defying writer”, said Wood.

‘Famously overlooked’

Science fiction is “famously overlooked” by the Booker Prize committee, said The Guardian. But although “The End of Everything” is set on Earth, readers can detect “the operatic wonder and alienation of space opera”.

Harrison published his first short story in Science Fantasy magazine in 1966, and became part of the New Wave science fiction literary movement in the 1970s. But from the beginning, he “butted at genre conventions”.

The “most capacious pigeonhole” for his novels is “Weird literature”. It emerged in the 1990s, blending elements of science fiction, fantasy, satire and horror, “often through a politically aware lens”. British novelist Olivia Laing called him “the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf”.

It’s easy to see why Harrison dislikes labels; he’s “spent half a century being dismissed as a sci-fi hack”, said The Telegraph. But this “gem” isn’t quite sci-fi, nor is it a thriller. It’s a “strange and beautiful thing”, one that “speaks to our deepest fears about collective memory and big tech”. It might be “speculative fiction” – but “unless you’re a bookshop, you don’t need to call it anything”.

Harrison’s Booker triumph is a reminder that the notion of “genre fiction” is “a paper tiger”. “Look down on sci-fi” and you’re looking down on J. G. Ballard, Frank Herbert and John Milton.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

As their interests expand and reading skills improve, children are lucky that literature evolves alongside them. These are the best chapter books for young readers transitioning to more complex stories.

‘Amelia Bedelia Means Business’ by Herman Parish (2013)

Parents and grandparents might remember the bumbling Amelia Bedelia from Peggy Parish’s original books. Her nephew, Herman Parish, continued that legacy of literary humor and idiom-fiddling with a series of chapter books tailored to young readers that starts with “Amelia Bedelia Means Business.” ($7, Greenwillow Books, Amazon)

‘Meet Yasmin!’ by Saadia Faruqi (2018)

Feisty second-grader Yasmin gets creative to solve everyday problems, with help from her Pakistani American family. The “colorful illustrations, short chapters” and an “approachable amount of text” create “a win-win,” said The Every Mom. ($3, Picture Window Books, Amazon)

‘Pug Blasts Off: A Branches Book’ by Kyla May (2019)

“Diary of a Pug” is another series popular among younger readers today. This installment introduces kids to Baron von Bubbles, aka Bub, the self-proclaimed world’s cutest pug. It is part of Scholastic’s Branches line of early chapter books “designed for those ready to read independently,” which helps them “transition from leveled readers” to chapter books, said Scholastic. ($8, Scholastic, Amazon)

‘The Princess in Black’ by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale (2015)

Princess Magnolia lives the royal life, but she also secretly transforms into the Princess in Black, a monster-fighting dynamo hiding her identity from the nosy Duchess Wigtower. This installment in an action-packed series for young readers is “great for read-aloud or beginning readers,” said Common Sense Media. ($18, Candlewick Press, Amazon)

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Thrillers come in many styles, from mind-numbingly psychological to high-octane crime. These are the most gripping novels of all time.

‘Strangers on a Train’ by Patricia Highsmith (1950)

Patricia Highsmith is better known for “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” but “Strangers on a Train” might be her “greatest book, reeling us in from the very beginning,” said Collider. During a chance meeting between two men on a train, one suggests that they each murder someone the other wants gone. Highsmith’s “genius lies in” shifting the focus “away from the murders themselves” and toward the “psychological burden that follows.” ($17, W. W. Norton & Company, Amazon)

‘Mystic River’ by Dennis Lehane (2001)

The consequences of an incident between three boyhood friends in 1970s Boston ripple for decades. When one of the trio’s teen daughters is murdered 25 years later, the book becomes an “enthralling study” in “remorse, revenge and the long tail of emotional trauma” told in Dennis Lehane’s “inimitably tender and profane style,” said The New York Times. ($20, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘In the Woods’ by Tana French (2007)

Tana French has established herself as one of the greats in the thriller genre, and her debut novel, “In The Woods,” remains one of her finest. Detective Rob Ryan is called to investigate a murder in the same woods where his childhood friends disappeared. It’s a “stone-cold stunner” of a book, “audacious, beautiful and entirely confident,” said Electric Lit. ($19, Penguin Books, Amazon)

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ by Stieg Larsson; translated by Reg Keeland (2008)

Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium juggernaut” began with this book, one of the century’s “more indelible literary creations,” The New York Times said. The book introduces goth-punk Swedish computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, whose “technical brilliance is matched only by her antisocial tendencies.” ($19, Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, Amazon)

A slew of fraud perpetrators appear to have found a new target: writers. Many people looking to promote their latest novels are reportedly falling victim to these scammers, who may promise authors access to the reading public while preying on them financially.

How are scammers zeroing in on authors?

Some involve book club scams, where “writers with published books have been receiving invitations from reading communities that start to unravel after a basic Google search,” said author Snigdha Poonam at The Dial. Other scams include situations that “sound too good to be true” for writers, including offers to “publish our next book, market our book, handle social media for us, represent us as agents and get us book-to-movie deals.”

Once the scammers are able to secure payment, often the “paper trail leads to Nigerian third parties holding bank accounts in America,” said The Dial. Author John Cocks paid a ‘Mary Brown’ $478 “for a book trailer and some commissioned reviews,” said The Guardian, after ‘Brown’ promised to “assist in the distribution to her ‘wide network’ of book clubs.” Cocks later noticed the PayPal receipt listed a Nigerian named Dayo Oguntuase.

AI also plays a large role, as it can “help to tailor emails, produce fake pictures and documents, and create websites” to lure in writers, said The Times. Authors who “normally consider themselves very tech savvy, not at all susceptible to any kind of scam,” are “suddenly being confronted” with AI-created deception, Eleanor Dawson of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain told the outlet.

How can authors protect themselves?

Use trustworthy sources. If an author hires a “qualified freelance marketing or PR team, you will pay significantly more ,  but you will also receive actual strategy, real outreach and meaningful expertise,” said Literary Hub. Once authors “know what to look for, the ‘read’ flags are hard to miss.”

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Terrence Holt is a physician, former literature professor, and the author of an acclaimed story collection, In the Valley of the Kings. His first novel, Soldiers & Sailors, follows a doctor who is transformed when he begins working at a veterans home.

‘The Mennyms’ series by Sylvia Waugh (1993–96)

Waugh wrote this series because “the world is too cynical, too lacking in magic.” Marketed as children’s fiction and anything but, the books offer a deep and serious consideration of what it means to be alive. I don’t think I’ve ever been so profoundly moved by any series fiction. Buy it here.

‘The Complete Morgaine’ by C.J. Cherryh (2015)

Morgaine displays all of Cherryh’s extraordinary gifts: powerful writing, propulsive plotting, complex human (and alien) characters in fully elaborated worlds tantalizingly similar to our own. Were she not a genre writer, she’d be on her way to Stockholm to pick up her Nobel. Buy it here.

‘Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov’ translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000)

A doctor and a writer of deceptively simple, risk-taking short stories (who else could get away with “A Boring Story”?), Chekhov has been the godfather of most of the short fiction written in English in the past century. Buy it here.

‘The Heart Sutra’

One of the foundational texts of Buddhism. I can’t claim to understand half of its few hundred words, but any sacred text (or is it a philosophical tract?) that states “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” is something every writer should know by heart. Buy it here.

‘The Odyssey’ by Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore (1965)

Homer’s adventure story has been my favorite work of fiction since I first learned to read. This lucid translation makes no apologies for preserving Homer’s (to us) nonidiomatic constructions. Reading it, I feel as if I’m in touch with a mind that, after 2,500 years, still leaves such clear traces of its utterly alien world and its immediately familiar humanity. Buy it here.

‘The Book of Job’ (King James translation, 1611)

I’m not remotely religious, but I return to the Hebrew Bible almost as often as I do The Odyssey. The tale of Job’s suffering, in a world determined by an inscrutable power, tackles the most important thing I know about being human, in words so beautiful they give me chills. And in the King James translation, I feel like I’m at the springhead of modern English. Buy it here.

‘The American Way of Killing’ by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell’s breezy, analytical style “may appear to work when addressing a subject that readers have never really thought about,” said Gary Younge in The Guardian. “But it breaks down with one that has been covered extensively”—like gun violence in America, the subject of his newest best seller. No one has been able to adequately diagnose why the U.S. has the highest rate of gun violence in the Western world. And the British-Canadian author of The Tipping Point and Blink hasn’t either, despite taking a different tack. Instead of laying out a single argument, as he’s done in other books, here he offers “a series of discrete, and at times related, observations.” Invoking the tale of the blind men who each focus on just the trunk or just the tusk, he says he hopes these observations will together give us a “sense of the whole elephant.” Yet the approach “somehow misses several elephants in the room.”

“The American Way of Killing may not change minds, but it may loosen them considerably,” said Terri Schlichenmeyer in The Philadelphia Tribune. Staying “calm, considerate, and balanced,” Gladwell argues that our debates about gun violence teem with misunderstandings and misrepresentations. He correctly points out, said Jessa Crispin in The Telegraph (U.K.), that of the roughly 45,000 gun deaths a year, the majority are impulsive or accidental, not the planned mass shootings that make the headlines. Gladwell doesn’t think banning assault-style rifles will change much—they account for a small slice of shootings—but don’t mistake him for a gun rights advocate. He handily argues that the Second Amendment specifically pertains to protecting plantation owners against slave rebellions, not everyone’s right to bear arms. Still, Gladwell is notorious for getting facts wrong, and it’s impossible to read him “without anticipating the long list of corrections that will soon follow.”

I was “genuinely fascinated” by some of Gladwell’s points, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. He explains that American doctors have more experience treating gun wounds than doctors anywhere else in the world, which superficially makes our nation seem less deadly than it is. But I sighed when he accused gun control advocates of engaging in “gun control theater,” one of many examples of “glib overconfidence” that “has the weird effect of making me object even when I agree with him.” And his book “doesn’t ultimately get us much closer to understanding” why we tolerate mass carnage, year after year. “Gladwell behaves as though the answer lies in our failure to see something he can reveal to us with a flourish.” Sadly, “I’m afraid the answers lie in a knot of political, cultural, and financial pathologies strangling this country.”

‘Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up’ by David Byrne

David Byrne’s ode to rediscovery “belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about creativity or culture,” said Adam Grant in The New York Times. Drawing on his reading of esoteric academic journals, the former Talking Heads frontman has written a “deeply researched, stimulating” account of so-called sleeping beauties: ideas, artworks, and technologies that were ignored, laughed at, or forgotten before ultimately being embraced. His “clear-eyed, hopeful” analysis is a reminder that geniuses “are often overlooked because they emerge ahead of their time” and that— even centuries later—it is “never too late for our work to find an audience.”

Byrne has assembled three-dozen case studies, and “some are better-known than others,” said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian. They include Antoni Gaudí— the now celebrated architect of Barcelona’s towering Sagrada Família—who fell so far from favor that, when he died in 1926 after being hit by a tram, he was mistaken for a beggar. Then there’s 17th-century Dutch master Vermeer. He was largely forgotten until the mid-1800s, when a French critic saw one of his paintings in a museum and published a catalog. But the book’s “most revelatory chapters eschew art for environmental and infrastructural stories.” In one standout, Byrne recounts how southern India’s medieval Chola dynasty financed “a complex network of pools, wells, and tanks” to channel monsoon overflows. Lost for centuries, those waterways have been revived through the work of “dogged” local activists.

“These stories of vindication are inherently compelling,” said Timothy Farrington in The Wall Street Journal. But a larger lesson never coheres, because Byrne sorts his micro-narratives into six “fairly arbitrary” categories that provide little practical guidance in spotting future sleeping beauties. And it’s “disappointing that Byrne writes so little about his own experience as a reanimator”: In 1988, he founded a record label, Luaka Bop, to introduce American audiences to lesser-known classics of world pop and psychedelia. Some of that specificity would have been welcome. Instead, the reader walks away with some “sturdy generalities,” and the lesson that the past “isn’t necessarily worse.”

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

That crisp fall weather is coming, and indoor reading’s coziness beckons. November brings a fresh batch of must-reads, including an autobiographical tour of LeVar Burton’s career and a timely debut that touches on racism and xenophobia.

‘Stations’ by Louise Kennedy

Kennedy’s sophomore novel, “Stations,” follows the relationship between Róisín McCaffrey and Red Camelin. Their love is “doomed before it can truly begin,” yet it is one Róisín never lets go of during the 25 years the novel spans, said The Boston Globe. Kennedy has earned a spot alongside “contemporary Irish greats.” (out now, $28, Random House, Amazon)

‘The Misogynists: A Reckoning with Modern Art’ by Allison Leigh

Art historian Allison Leigh pulls the curtain back on how misogyny shaped the modern art world. The book’s “deeply researched cultural history” of the careers of “six art world giants” reveals how toxic they were to women, said Lit Hub. The “misogynistic exploitation” by these “still revered icons” was “shocking even to their contemporaries.” (Nov. 10, $35, Abrams, Amazon)

‘The Squatters’ by Saba Brelvi

Saba Brelvi’s promising debut “touches on multiple hot-button topics,” including “migration, refugee resettlement, racism, xenophobia, wealth inequality” and what we owe as a society “to the least among us,” said The AV Club. It tells of an American expat living just outside London who faces a predicament when helping asylum seekers goes wrong. (Nov. 10, $29, The Dial Press, Amazon)

‘Take My Word for It: A Memoir’ by LeVar Burton

LeVar Burton takes readers through the decades of his award-winning screen career. The book centers on three pivotal moments in Burton’s life: dropping out of college to star in “Roots”; hosting “Reading Rainbow”; and playing the blind engineer Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” He also discusses mental illness and “why he’s become a literacy activist,” said The New York Times. (Nov. 10, $32, Random House, Amazon)

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Science fiction’s greatest books peer into the future and ask readers to imagine life beyond our own — for both better and worse. These are the essential works by visionary authors.

‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick (1968)

Set in 2021, after a world war that wiped out millions, Philip K. Dick’s darkly prescient novel inspired the blockbuster film “Blade Runner.” It follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he hunts rogue androids hiding among Earth’s humans. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is a “weighty foray” into what makes us human and will “linger with you for a long time,” said Esquire. ($18, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Ender’s Game’ by Orson Scott Card (1985)

Orson Scott Card’s “Ender” series, a gateway into the genre, has captivated many burgeoning science-fiction fans. The first book, “Ender’s Game,” is a “high-stakes, militaristic twist on sci-fi,” said Reader’s Digest. The series will appeal to those who “enjoy reading historical fiction and novels about war.” ($20, Macmillan, Amazon)

‘Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia E. Butler (1993)

Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” follows teenage prophet Lauren Oya Olamina as she navigates creating a new religion in an eerily familiar postapocalyptic California of 2024. This first half of a duology feels like a “plea to America, echoing through time and begging us to remember principles we are all weaker for having forgotten,” said The New York Times. ($24, Seven Stories Press, Amazon)

‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Cixin Liu (2006)

Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award-winning “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy starts with “The Three-Body Problem,” a thrilling tale of extraterrestrial contact set against China’s Cultural Revolution. The book marks the rise of an author who has become “every bit as canonical” as other famous novelists of the genre, said Esquire. ($19, Macmillan, Amazon)

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Audiobooks combine compelling storytelling with expressive narration that can transport listeners to another world. From classic literature to contemporary favorites, these are the most memorable audiobooks ever recorded.

‘A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire’ by George R.R. Martin (2003)

George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series now has an HBO television adaptation, but fans first heard the story come alive when the audio version was released. Many audiobooks win awards, but this one has “broken records,” said Good Housekeeping. It earned a place in the Guinness World Records for the most character voices in an audiobook, delivered in style by British actor Roy Dotrice. (Audible, Everand, Libro.fm, Spotify)

‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ by Maya Angelou (2011)

Maya Angelou’s poetic autobiography is considered an American classic, and there are “few better ways to encounter the work” than through a “narration by Maya Angelou herself,” said Esquire. The seven-volume series chronicles her life from her childhood in Arkansas through motherhood. (Audible, Everand, Libro.fm, Spotify)

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee (2014)

For many, “To Kill a Mockingbird” elicits distant memories of school-assigned reading, but the audiobook of “Harper Lee’s magnum opus” is a “must-listen,” said Esquire. With actor Sissy Spacek “serving as your gateway” to such iconic literary figures as Scout and Atticus Finch, you are immersed in the “powerful tale of justice, hatred and America.” (Audible, Everand, Libro.fm)

‘The Dutch House: A Novel’ by Ann Patchett (2019)

Ann Patchett’s Pulitzer-nominated novel spawned a Grammy- and Audie-nominated audiobook, narrated by Tom Hanks. The actor brings his “customary warmth and sensitivity” to a “multigenerational tale” with “shades of ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ plus a dash of ‘Cinderella,’” said The Guardian. (Audible, Everand, Libro.fm, Spotify)

AI is causing “a crisis of trust” in publishing, said Vauhini Vara in The Atlantic. Earlier this month, Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing—worth $13,000—for a short story that “has all the personality of a chatbot.” That may not be coincidental: Pangram, an artificial-intelligence-powered AI detection tool, flagged “almost the entire story as AI-generated.” Kundizeza is not the first award recipient to be flagged by Pangram; it deemed one of the winning stories in this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize to have been entirely authored by AI. Kundizeza says his story, “The Blue Fighter,” is “entirely my work.” Pangram is reputed to be “highly accurate”—the company claims its tool misidentifies AI use in just 1 out of 24,000 cases—but it’s not infallible. So who should we trust? The author or Pangram?

This is exactly the “chaos” that publishers feared, said Anna Silman in The Wall Street Journal. Publishing houses have tried to crack down on AI usage by authors, inserting strict clauses into book deals and leaning on Pangram to vet manuscripts. But “a new AI scandal engulfing” the industry seemingly every month is “forcing a reckoning over the nature of authorship.” The Big Five publishing houses—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan—have been reluctant to “make sweeping pronouncements about” the technology, possibly because they’re waiting to see if people care whether the books they’re reading are AI-generated or AI-assisted, “especially in genres like fantasy and sci-fi.” Meanwhile, many writers feel that a contract clause “that relies on the honor system lacks the teeth necessary to combat” intellectual dishonesty.

I write a lot, and I use AI, and I’m worried that “I’ve started to internalize” how a chatbot thinks, said Alex Kirshner in Slate. I’ve begun to “self-police against this,” modifying my drafts “to sound less like AI.” I also put my work into Pangram “before it appears anywhere else” to ensure that “the model concurs that I wrote it myself.” It feels dystopian—I’ve had to “rewrite sentences of my own work in hopes of satisfying this new integrity god.”

Still, we need the “AI slop detectors,” said Brian X. Chen in The New York Times. The tools do more than pick out obvious indicators of AI authorship, such as the excessive use of em dashes and bullet points. They’re trained to understand how AI models make decisions on word selection and phrasing. Pangram, which costs $20 a month, is incredibly “useful for sniffing out annoyances like AI-written email scams and phony online reviews.” Yes, the technology “still has a long way to go.” But “at the rate that slop is proliferating on the web,” it’s an “empowering” tool for people who still want to read the human-written word.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Naomi Alderman is the author of The Power, a 2016 best seller that won the U.K.’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. In her new novel, The Strangers, a writer also named Naomi Alderman is wrestling with grief when she discovers an alien animal species that begins proliferating.

‘The Vintner’s Luck’ by Elizabeth Knox (1998)

I read this in my early 20s when I was starting to work hard on my writing. I thought, If I can ever write anything as good, I’ll be happy forever. In 1808, a French winemaker meets an angel and, impossibly, they fall in love. It is about everything: love, sex, faith, death, memory, redemption, God. Buy it here.

‘Possession’ by A.S. Byatt (1990)

The best and classiest and most intellectual kind of mystery novel. In an archive, a researcher finds lost letters exchanged by two Victorian writers. Why were they writing to each other? Were they having an affair? And who else wants to uncover the truth? Just superb. Buy it here.

‘Leech’ by Hiron Ennes (2022)

I could not put this down, in a way I hadn’t experienced for years. A doctor arrives at a strange old castle to replace his predecessor who has died suddenly. But when he performs an autopsy on the older doctor, something strange wriggles inside him. A full world you can sink into that grips like, indeed, a leech. Buy it here.

‘Chocky’ by John Wyndham (1968)

A young boy believes he’s in contact with an alien. But the alien can’t be seen or felt; it’s only communicating with the boy’s mind. It can’t be real, can it? But if not, where are these strange new ideas in his mind coming from? The book is mesmerizing on parental love and as a weird tale. Buy it here.

‘The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James’ (1931)

James is the Victorian master of the ghost story. An M.R. James protagonist tends to be an academic—someone driven by curiosity who doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. His novels are absolute master classes in how much to reveal, how much to leave to the reader’s terrified imagination. Buy it here.

‘Ficciones’ by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)

Borges writes stories that are an idea, an absolute crystalline unforgettable thought. I fell into these as a teenager, read them again and again; I could practically recite The Lottery in Babylon by heart for you. You’d also get a decent education just reading all the writers Borges mentions in his stories. Buy it here.

‘The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest best seller is “a triumph of blood-and-thunder narrative history,” said Sean McMeekin in The Wall Street Journal. At a time when conflict in the Middle East is again touching lives around the world, the British historian has delivered a sweeping and energetic account of the region’s turbulent last 125 years. Beginning in 1902, when the young prince Ibn Saud seized Riyadh to puncture Ottoman dominance, “Montefiore doesn’t play favorites, subjecting all his characters to scrutiny.” We get British and French meddling during and after World War I, the dramatic reset brought on by the next global conflict, and Cold War machinations that enflamed new conflicts. Then comes the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which Montefiore characterizes as epochal in its impact. “Not all his stories are original,” of course, “but he enriches them with fascinating details.”

“While vast in scope, The Cauldron is written in a way that is equally accessible to regional experts and neophytes,” said Jonathan Harounoff in the New York Post. Often, his story is carried by “the compelling and, at times, insidious characters who helped forge the Middle East we know today.” Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, Qatar’s founding emir, sired 56 children. King Farouk, who ruled Egypt for 16 years, was addicted to gambling, food, and sex. As Montefiore marches readers though various crises and flashpoints, said Mark Urban in The Times (U.K.), he shows a determination to nail down which actors deserve blame. “Time and again,” he shows that the region’s leaders have been more than mere puppets, having more agency than self-regarding Westerners might suspect. And though he rips into Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, today’s Israeli right wing, and many other regional players, “this is not a polemic but a work of history in which his judgments are rooted in deep research.”

The astonishing scope of the book is “both its greatest strength and its principal weakness,” said Sam Kiley in The Independent (U.K.). At his best, Montefiore “can make a complicated political order suddenly legible through a few deft sentences,” but the pileup of rulers, coups, and wars at times becomes “so dense that the reader can struggle to retain a firm sense of causation.” He also “distributes sympathy unevenly,” favoring pragmatists over fervent believers and, subtly, Israelis over Palestinians in the Middle East conflict that so often looms largest in the minds of outsiders. Montefiore is “too candid about Israeli wrongdoing to be described as an apologist.” Better yet, he’s written a book that anyone could learn from. “Its scholarship, range, and vitality make it an impressive achievement.”

‘Death of an Ordinary Man’ by Sarah Perry

“Death of an Ordinary Man is not a remarkable story,” said Amy Bloom in The New York Times. “What is remarkable is this book.” In 2022, a 77-year-old man was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and died nine days later. Because the man was her father-in-law, British novelist Sarah Perry watched that small drama unfold at close range after she and her husband moved in to provide 24-hour care. In Perry’s attentive account of those nine days, “there are no celestial visits, no shocking reconciliations.” Instead, there’s incontinence, there’s paperwork, and there are good and bad medical people—“all the things people ordinarily don’t write about.” Those details belong in this gift of a work, though, because “Perry’s entire point is that this condition of being alive includes, inevitably and properly, the process of dying.”

In speaking of her own experience in those final days, Perry “captures the feeling of existing in a strange, panicked void,” said Karin Altenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Perry and her husband, Robert, both previously busy with other things, suddenly find themselves caretakers sleeping on the floor of their patient’s bungalow. The world outside ceases to exist as nurses, relatives, and clergy visit. Meanwhile, Perry and Robert are figuring the logistics of end-of-life care in real time straight through to their charge’s final breath. Many of us are likely to find ourselves in a similar situation one day, and through her “deeply tender” account, Perry has “extended a hand to the reader with profound grace.

“It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special,” said Joe Moran in The Guardian (U.K.). David Perry, the ostensible subject, was such a content, reserved Englishman that “some may even find him a little boring.” In part, Perry’s beautifully written book “works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism with which it recounts a particular, unrepeatable life.” More than that, though, “what makes this book gem-like is that it succeeds in conveying the reality of death as this monumental, mythic thing that coexists surreally with the mundane world of council bin collections.” Though the breakdown of David’s body isn’t dignified, Perry notices that it’s also transfiguring, right down to this ordinary man’s fingertips.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

As one of the most popular and top-selling genres, romance has long transported readers into captivating love stories. These four swoon-worthy novels are perfect for anyone seeking an amorous read.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen (1813)

Scholars celebrate Austen’s “pioneering use of free indirect discourse,” but you don’t need to be an expert to appreciate that “she helped invent the romantic comedy as we know it,” said Time. A “drolly perceptive chronicle” of Elizabeth Bennet’s “bumpy courtship” with Fitzwilliam Darcy, Austen’s “second and most influential novel” is the “ultimate slow burn.” ($25, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Outlander’ by Diana Gabaldon (1991)

After World War II, British combat nurse Claire and her husband embark on a second honeymoon to reconnect. Instead, she somehow “winds up in 1743 Scottish highlands” and falls in love with warrior Jamie — a “very different and very passionate relationship,” said Forbes. The first in a beloved series, this novel is best for fans of “time travel, historical fiction and very long novels.” ($30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The Notebook’ by Nicholas Sparks (1996)

The bond between Noah and Allie, the star-crossed lovers at the center of both the novel and the classic 2004 film, has ensnared romantics for decades. Their love feels “both idealized and grounded,” spanning “years, obstacles and ultimately memory loss.” The result is “more powerful than a typical love story,” said Business Insider. ($25, Hachette Book Group, Amazon)

‘Before I Let Go’ by Kennedy Ryan (2022)

Yasmen and her ex-husband, Josiah, try their best to coparent and run a business together, but they keep being pulled back into each other’s arms. Kennedy Ryan’s “emotion-driven books” are “anything but fluff,” tackling deeper issues such as “mental health and neurodivergence, social injustices, and climate change,” said Marie Claire. ($40, Hachette Book Group, Amazon)

Because a handful of authors dominate mainstream horror fiction, it can be easy to miss how rich and diverse literary horror is, including, of course, the work of Stephen King. These four novels combine sharp prose with well-crafted terror.

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by Shirley Jackson (1959)

An enormously influential work of dread, Shirley Jackson’s classic haunted house tale remains one of the rare horror books to receive literary awards. It is “one of the 20th century’s finest horror novels — and maybe the definitive haunted house story,” said Lara Zarum at The New York Times.

‘The Stand’ by Stephen King (1978)

Among Stephen King’s dozens of fiction books, “The Stand” remains his epic masterwork. It is about a flu named Captain Trips that wipes out 99.4% of the world’s population and forces the survivors to choose between the forces of good and evil. King’s “most sweeping horror novel” is also a “kind of inventory of American culture,” said Kirkus Reviews.

‘Come Closer’ by Sara Gran (2003)

Short enough to read in a single sitting, Sara Gran’s chilling story of an architect succumbing to demonic possession will leave readers stunned and unsettled. A “book that could damage the unwary psyche,” its “genius is in making the strange details so commonplace and incidental that ambiguity survives,” said Neil McRobert at Esquire.

‘The Grip of It’ by Jac Jemc (2017)

A troubled young couple moves from the big city and buys a small, haunted house, in a familiar set-up made terrifyingly unsettling by the way the reader is plunged into nonlinearity and fear alongside the characters. In “prose that is poetic and bereft of consolation,” Jemc “unsettles our notions of the boundaries between ourselves, our partners and anything else that may hurt us,” said Ahsan Butt at The Rumpus.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

A new “Carrie” adaptation is introducing another generation to the storytelling prowess of horror icon Stephen King. Here are the best of the hundreds of novels King fans have devoured for decades.

‘The Shining’ (1977)

Literary critics and fans often say “The Shining” is “one of King’s most important novels” and “with good reason,” said Forbes. The book follows writer Jack Torrance and his family to the haunted Overlook Hotel in the isolated Colorado mountains. “The Shining” is a good read for fans who enjoy “psychological thrillers that merge with horror.” ($20, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The Stand’ (1978)

King’s eerie postapocalyptic novel “The Stand,” set in a “world ravaged by a ruthless pandemic,” follows an ensemble of characters across the “new, dangerous country.” The story builds to a “climactic battle between heaven and hell,” said Reader’s Digest. It’s a tale of “spiritual and sinister wonders, all told” with King’s “distinct wit and writing style.” ($22, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger’ (1982)

The seven-book “Dark Tower” series is “King’s truest Tolkien analogue,” said The New York Times. It is an epic in “multiple modes (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, Western)” about a “gunslinger-knight” trying to save the world from “complete destruction by his foe, the Man in Black.” The first volume, “The Gunslinger,” is the shortest and gives you a “tiny taste of how weird and inventive the series gets.” ($29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘It’ (1986)

King’s “treatise on everything he’s learned about his dark craft” by that point in his career is “poured into the story of Pennywise,” a fear-eating shapeshifting entity, and the “gaggle of outcast children who choose to fight” the creature, said Esquire. The book’s eccentricity balances perfectly with the “romanticized myth of childhood summers” and the “grain and grit reality” of 1960s Maine. ($25, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

Somewhat “miraculously”, Bonnie Garmus managed to make science and feminism “fun” in her bestselling debut novel “Lessons in Chemistry”, said The Boston Globe. In her second book, she is “poised to do the same thing for even more esoteric loves: poetry, fonts and literary publishing”.

The novel follows the life of Batter Gray, a middle-class Californian boy who possesses a “deep love” of poetry, much to his parents’ dismay. After graduating from college, he moves to New York to pursue his passion. “Like so many people coming of age in the city, he rents a terrible apartment, works three crummy jobs, and finally finds a girlfriend.”

Gray seems “destined” to end up at Peck & Peck, a “rarefied, pricey poetry journal”, though he’s the “copy guy”, working in the basement. Down there, “as is not uncommon in literary circles, he finds both mentors and nemeses” as he negotiates his way upwards.

In telling her story, Garmus creates a “Ferris wheel of characters”, like his font designer mother and “chaotic tyrant” of a boss. They and the many plot twists all “snap together delightfully” and make for a “rollicking good story”. If her debut novel “made you love chemistry, this one might just make you fall for poetry. Such is the force of happiness.”

There is a certain “mawkishness” that creeps into “Peck & Peck”, said The Guardian. As in Garmus’ first book, there is a “preternaturally intelligent dog”, added to a fragile love story and a hasty courtroom scene. But it is impossible not to be beguiled by the “freewheeling exuberance of her imagination”, and the “fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count”.

You might not have thought a novel set in the world of poetry could be funny, but “you’d be wrong”, said the Los Angeles Times. “The repartee sparkles” and the “farcical touches lighten the tone”. But it’s inspiring too. Batter, for all his quirks, is “perhaps the best poetry ambassador to have ever graced the pages of a novel”. Readers will be “hard-pressed to resist becoming a poetry stan”.

Above all, this is a “workplace comedy, a New York City coming-of-age story, and a giddy satire wrapped in a sometimes-ungainly bundle”, said Laura Miller on Slate. The Peck & Peck office, home to a whopping 39 editors and crowned with a “spectacular glass dome”, is “pure fantasia”, but Garmus does at times “ladle gooey dollops of sentimentality” into her work.

There is an “almost Wodehousian giddiness” to the book, but Garmus’ satire never comes across as “mean or bitter”. Characters sceptical of poetry and its place in the world are treated as generously as those who love it, because the form “is in truth both boring and transcendent”.

“Peck & Peck” may not reach the heights of “Lessons in Chemistry” but it is a “rare work of popular fiction that has prompted me to look up a William Carlos Williams poem, and I suspect I won’t be the only one on whom it has that particular, and very welcome, effect”.

Kate Atkinson is the celebrated author of Life After Life, Case Histories, and 12 other novels set mostly in her native U.K. In her latest, Our Noble Selves, a former POW becomes a murder suspect while helping stage a 1951 festival intended to boost national morale.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871–72)

Essentially, Middlemarch is a historical novel, set in the period 50 years prior to its publication. Eliot’s breadth and ambition and energy in painting a picture of a society in the midst of cataclysmic change is astounding. I also think it’s a very romantic book—not something Eliot is often accused of.

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

It took many years before Vonnegut felt able to give fictional shape to his experiences as a POW in the Dresden firestorm. The time-­ traveling, science-­fiction elements along with Vonnegut’s typical off-­kilter style work against the odds to make this—along with its ­ brother-in-arms, Heller’s Catch-22—one of the most powerful novels about World War II.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

I could have simply picked all six of Austen’s novels, but if I had to choose one, then this final one—a profound exploration of the human heart—would be the one. It is also about the pain of the path not chosen and the absolute powerlessness of women.

‘Parade’s End’ by Ford Madox Ford (1924–28)

This is cheating perhaps, because it’s actually a tetralogy that follows the fortunes of Christopher Tietjens from before the First World War and into its aftermath. It’s one of those novels—sorry, four novels—that I have trouble describing and am inclined to say, “Just read it.”

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ by Laurence Sterne (1759–67)

Tristram Shandy is a very funny, digressive novel about a man trying to write his autobiography and failing to get past the first scene. I always remember my English tutor at university introducing it by saying that it was one of the first novels and also one of the first antinovels, although nowadays I think they would probably call it metafiction.

‘Just William’ by Richmal Crompton (1922)

I had a quietly passive only-­childhood, but ­William provided an alternative, escapist universe of naughtiness and high spirits. Even now, I would, if I could, be happy to live in William’s world. And have a dog called Jumble.

“It is a shame how many people wouldn’t dream of reading James Marriott’s eloquent, learned, and admirably brief book,” said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street ­ Journal. Reading is dying, as the 33-year-old London Times columnist tells us, so it’s inevitable that most of the public will miss out on the joys of following him as he lays out his concerns. The causes of his worries aren’t new. A 2022 survey found that in the previous 12 months fewer than half of American adults had read a book. A year later, another study found that in an average day only 16% read anything for pleasure. Of course, there’s “a lot more at stake” in this decline than good books being left unread. Marriott, by revisiting ties between the rise of mass literacy and mass democracy, “makes a strong case” that long-form reading is a necessary ingredient to sustaining the kind of rational and probing collective dialogue that has made mass democracy possible.

Marriott “might be insufficiently pessimistic,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post. Though he’s right that smartphones and the short-form videos they spawn have contributed to reading’s decline, the larger problem is that too many of our fellow citizens have become “pathetically nostalgic for the mental lassitude of pre-literate people.” It was not until the 18th century that large numbers of our forebears began reading widely, but we have them to thank for launching the modern age, and today, as childish thinking spreads, we’re seeing that “reason, tolerance, and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.” Marriott, “like many alarmists,” builds his argument on ­ cherry-picked data, said Chris Ferguson in Reason. He reports that reading scores for U.S. students hit an all-time low in 2024 without mentioning that they’d peaked in 2012, several years after the advent of smartphones. Meanwhile, the supposed link between literacy and healthy democracies is undermined by the highly literate societies that gave birth to the fascist regimes of 20th-­century Germany, Italy, and Japan.

“The New Dark Ages is too ominously titled,” said Michael O’Donnell in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Throughout the book, Marriott “thoughtfully acknowledges” evidence that reading and reason might not be utterly doomed, though he could have done more to acknowledge that the work many of us do still requires a lot of reading and writing. “Are we courting the same scenario as the Middle Ages, when a select few held the keys to knowledge, to the exclusion of all others? Probably not.” Still, “the thrust of Marriott’s ­argument — there is a decline in reading that is antithetical to the progress of the ­Enlightenment — strikes me as persuasive.”

Go into a British bookshop and you may notice “a glaring stock gap”, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “Star novelist” Sally Rooney, whose bestsellers include “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, has announced that her books will no longer be sold in the UK due to her support for Palestine Action.

The Irish novelist had pledged to donate royalties from her books to the direct-action protest group, despite the fact that the UK has, controversially, proscribed it as a terrorist organisation. Rooney said last week that her publisher, Faber & Faber, had therefore decided it could no longer sell her work in the UK because doing so could “constitute a serious criminal offence”. For fans and bookshop owners, the news “hit like a gut punch”.

‘Affront to decency’

Rooney has shown courage in choosing “the thorniest path possible for this cause”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Authors can “write essays and sign letters” in support of Palestinian people, musicians can shout about it on stage, but that doesn’t “entail actively breaking the terrorism laws”. It’s Rooney’s support for this specific group that’s “effectively both barred” and “banned” her work from the UK and cost her "innumerable” sales and opportunities.

For her “more excitable” home-grown fans, it’s a case of “perfidious Albion strikes again”, said Eilis O'Hanlon in the Irish Independent. Fellow Irish novelist Colm Tóibín said Britain had gone “insane”, and the whole issue is “an absolute affront to decency” and freedom of speech. But I think that framing is “ridiculous”. Even if “the fiendish Brits” wanted to prosecute one of its “most illustrious” publishers for paying one of its authors what she is owed, Rooney is an Irish citizen living in Ireland, and thus not subject to UK terror laws. Her personal freedom of speech and right to protest are not at any risk. And Faber can keep publishing and promoting her in other countries, including her native Ireland.

‘Attention-seeking self-aggrandisement’

Despite “the uproar”, this isn’t “massively risky” for either Rooney or Faber, said Camilla Long in The Times. How many of her “whopping 6 million” worldwide book sales will she forgo? Her books “remain in libraries” and in any bookshops where they were already stocked. This isn’t a “book ban”; it’s a millionaire’s “self-imposed withdrawing of one’s further sales”.

This is “attention-seeking self-aggrandisement”, said Lionel Shriver in The Telegraph. Thanks to lucrative TV adaptations of her novels, Rooney can “easily live without further British royalties” and continue to “shout her devotion to Palestinians from the rooftops” (or fund their cause via multiple legal outfits). Faber, on the other hand, was caught “between a rock and a hard place”.

I’m “no fan” of Palestine Action; some of its members have “committed a campaign of criminal damage”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. But Rooney and Faber have pushed the “simultaneous intolerance and vagueness of the UK government’s position” on the group onto “the front tables at Waterstones”. Supporters of Palestine Action are “being bundled into paddy-wagons for wearing T-shirts”. Will a UK citizen now face arrest for saying “I support Sally Rooney” or “carrying a ‘Normal People’ tote bag”? The problem isn’t Rooney’s speech, free or otherwise; it’s Britain’s “inconsistent attempt to police the border between legitimate protest and criminal thuggery”. What a “fine mess” we’re in.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

From the classic ‘Whodunit’ style to thrilling neonoirs, mystery novels have compelled readers to solve cases alongside detectives like Hercule Poirot. Here are the best, smartest and most revolutionary titles the genre created.

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

A round-up of the best mystery novels of all time is “incomplete without mentioning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work,” said Book Riot. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most “recognizable fictional detectives in pop culture.” His iconic novel follows the investigation of an “apparition of a monstrous dog” that purportedly “murdered Sir Charles Baskerville.” ($7, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Murder on the Orient Express’ by Agatha Christie (1934)

Sticking all your characters in a “contained bubble” and “throwing away the key” is a great way to “create tension and intrigue,” said thriller writer Hank Phillippi Ryan at The New York Times. Agatha Christie, the “queen of the locked room,” did it with “great panache and sleight of hand” by “misdirecting the reader into believing there was just one murderer.” ($19, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote (1965)

Truman Capote’s bestseller “pioneered a new classification of novels”: true crime, said A&E. Capote’s “groundbreaking, real-life story” about a terrifying quadruple murder “effortlessly married” the “technique of colorful storytelling” with the “clarity and accuracy of journalism.” ($28, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ by Walter Mosley (1990)

The first novel in the Easy Rawlins hardboiled detective series introduced the world to Mosley’s neonoir classic’s World War II veteran protagonist. Strapped for cash, Rawlins accepts a murder case whose resolution necessitates bringing the “superficially submerged tensions” between “Black and white Americans” to the surface, said Time. ($19, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

“Jeffrey Archer, who has died aged 86, was irrepressible,” said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian – “though not necessarily in a good way.” At various points, he was accused of lying about his background, embellishing his CV, committing plagiarism and fraud and – perhaps worst of all – of being “unpleasant to underlings”. And while some of the allegations were never proved, he was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in jail.

Yet Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare – senior Tory politician, former athlete, bestselling novelist and bon viveur – simply sailed on. Editors continued to adulate him; his books kept selling in their millions; and sports stars, writers and politicians still flocked to the “shepherd’s pie and Krug” parties he hosted in his “sumptuous”, art-filled apartment overlooking the Thames. Archer, it turned out, was what the “Titanic” was supposed to be: “unsinkable”.

Murky beginnings

Growing up in Weston-super-Mare, Archer was doted on by his mother, who worked as a journalist on the local paper and sent him to Wellington School on a scholarship. As an adult, he’d imply that he had been to the grander Wellington College. Bullied for being puny, he threw himself into athletics and bodybuilding, and distinguished himself as a sprinter. He stayed at the school until 18, yet left with just three O levels.

On the basis of a false report that he had three A levels and had studied anatomy at a university in the US, he was then accepted to Oxford. But though he presented himself as an undergraduate at Brasenose, he was actually doing a one-year diploma in education at a teacher training college linked to it.

As a student in Oxford, he arranged fundraising drives for Oxfam, including via the coup of persuading The Beatles to appear at Brasenose. Yet as Michael Crick revealed in his biography, Oxfam was not only troubled by the way he exaggerated the sums he had raised; it also suspected that he was skimming off funds.

In Oxford, Archer met Mary Weeden, a chemistry student who became his wife in 1966. Settling in London, he found work as a fundraiser for the United Nations Association. Its chair, the ex-Tory MP Humphry Berkeley, became convinced that he was embezzling funds. But the UNA hushed it up, and Archer was accepted for the safe Tory seat in Louth, Lincolnshire, which he won at a by-election in 1969.

Pride and perjury

In his writing, Archer was no stylist, but he could tell a “rollicking story”, said The Times. In 1976, his debut novel, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less”, became a bestseller. His novels would go on to sell more than 300 million copies. He also returned to politics: Margaret Thatcher made him deputy Tory chairman in 1985, describing him as “the extrovert’s extrovert”.

Then, in 1986, the Daily Star sensationally accused Archer of having been a client of a sex worker named Monica Coghlan. He sued for libel and, in court, denied ever even meeting Coghlan (though he did admit to asking an intermediary to pay her £2,000 in cash to leave the country). She was vilified as a liar and an extortionist. In summing up, the judge famously highlighted Mary Archer’s testimony: “Remember Mary Archer in the witness box,” he told the jury. “Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?” With such a wife, how could Archer “possibly be in need of cold, unloving rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel?” Having presented what seemed to be a solid alibi, Archer won and was awarded £500,000 in damages.

Two years later, Archer was accused of insider dealing over shares he’d bought in Anglia TV just before a takeover bid. His wife sat on the firm’s board. He was cleared of that, but then fell out with a friend who had helped concoct his alibi in the libel case, and was charged with perjury.

Following his release from jail, Archer published his prison diaries, carried on with his charity work and wrote more novels. Mary, who survives him with their sons, remained by his side to the end. Explaining her loyalty, she once said: “I think I would find it a little monochrome, a little grey, to have a sort of a more conventional life with a more conventional husband.”

The broadcaster and champion of the high street, who transformed the fortunes of Harvey Nichols, picks her favourites. She will be talking about her latest book, “I Shop, Therefore I Am”, at Stratford Literary Festival on 1 November.

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1929

This book isn’t really about how to become a better poet, it’s about how to live. Rilke writes about solitude, love, patience and learning to live with uncertainty.

The Sea, The Sea

Iris Murdoch, 1978

Both entertaining and deeply unsettling. I love the way Murdoch gets inside the mind of someone who is completely convinced by his own version of reality. I once followed her around an airport because I so wanted to talk to her about this book – but was too in awe to say anything.

The Cost of Living

Deborah Levy, 2018

In this moving memoir Levy details the reality of reclaiming autonomy post-divorce. It sharply critiques the invisible burdens placed on women, while weaving in hopeful observations of everyday life.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Heather Clark, 2020

This deeply researched book rescues Plath from the tragic cliché of her death and is focused instead on the immense vitality of how she lived. Plath is shown not as a passive victim of despair, but as a brilliant intellectual and visionary poet.

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton, 1920

Wharton’s portrayal of 1870s New York society shows a world that is both dazzling and suffocating. The central romance captures the conflict between desire and duty, while the bittersweet ending shows how the choices we make can shape an entire lifetime.

Cider with Rosie

Laurie Lee, 1959

I’m blessed to have a house in the Slad Valley where Lee grew up. When I see the apple trees in bloom, it brings home this chronicle of his childhood. He evokes the warmth of a chaotic, loving family and the transition of a rustic world into the modern age.

The popularity of the NBA, which begins its season on Oct. 20, skyrocketed starting in the early 1980s. And the heightened salience of the growing fast-paced sport in American popular culture has created its own literary canon, including these four standouts.

‘The Breaks of the Game’ by David Halberstam (1981)

David Halberstam embedded himself with the 1979-1980 Portland Trail Blazers and here describes the daily travails of a team struggling to return to championship form. It is “one of the best books I’ve ever read about American sports,” said Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at The New York Times.

‘The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James’ by Scott Raab (2011)

Esquire’s Scott Raab followed LeBron James in the years before and after he left the Cleveland Cavaliers for a book that doubles as a kind of memoir covering the writer’s tumultuous personal life. It’s a story of a “truly talented writer pouring his heart and soul into a book about a city he loves,” said John Krolik at Cavs: the blog.

‘Hoop Dreams: A True Story of Hardship and Triumph’ by Ben Joravsky (1995)

Joravsky movingly chronicles the lives and challenges of the celebrated film documentary’s protagonists, Arthur Agee and William Gates, both of whom hailed from troubled Chicago neighborhoods. “Hoop Dreams” is “at once a heart-wrenching and uplifting story of survival,” said Publisher’s Weekly.

‘Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s’ by Jeff Pearlman (2014)

The 1980s-era Los Angeles Lakers won five NBA championships, and Pearlman covers the dramatic achievements of the team on the hardwood in addition to its off-court exploits. The book functions as an “excavation of a long-lost era, as well as a pulsing, utterly relevant roadmap into our 21st-century sports celebrity culture,” said Dave Zirin at The Nation.

“My most cherished, most powerful food memories involve two ingredients: rice and pork,” said chef Donald Link in his book “Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking from Donald Link’s Louisiana.” It is a common refrain for people who were raised in the prairies and bayous of southern Louisiana.

The rice is there in the region’s popular eggplant dressing, dirty rice with chicken livers and in crawfish pies. Pork appears as cracklins, those deep-fried nubbins of seasoned pork belly and in all manner of Deep South charcuterie. Rice and pork even tango together in the region’s legendary sausage called boudin. Donald Link, born in southwest Louisiana, is the owner of a handful of restaurants in New Orleans, and “Real Cajun” takes you on a personal tour of all these tastes of his homeland, plus legions more.

Two foundational ingredients

No two boudins are alike, but the “truth is, they are all good,” said Link in his book. If you have had the privilege of eating multiple boudins from different shops, you know Link spills facts. His stars both pork shoulder and liver, plus two types of fresh chiles, a glut of spices and, of course, white rice.

Lima beans appear in a stew alongside smoked sausage; a suave pork roast is served over, yes, rice. Even chicken thighs are stuffed with sausage. Pork is ubiquitous, and rice nearly as much so, appearing in a gratin with zucchini, a soup with chicken and a fritter known as calas.

And beyond

Freshness and fiber are everywhere across “Real Cajun” too. Tender lettuces are slicked with a scallion-buttermilk dressing. Tomatoes bring a lush tang to stewed okra.

A sweet finish is obligatory. So there are recipes for satsuma-buttermilk pie, chocolate-pecan tart, blueberry cobbler and a staple of Link’s youth: lemon meringue pie. Man cannot live on rice and pork alone.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Five-time Booker Prize nominee Sebastian Barry is the author of A Long Long Way, On Canaan’s Side, and Days Without End. The Irish author’s new novel, The Newer World, follows a formerly enslaved Tennessean who’s navigating America’s post–Civil War era.

‘Letters and Journals: Katherine Mansfield’ (1977)

The dark wind of a fatal illness blows through these letters and journals. Mansfield was only 34 when she died. She was the only writer that Virginia Woolf truly felt as a rival, and with very good reason. Buy it here.

‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope (1867)

Trollope had his manservant wake him early every morning and he would write till 8 a.m. By this method he managed to produce a great number of long, long books. The six volumes of the Barchester novels are crowned by The Last Chronicle of Barset, 900 pages of infinite readability. Buy it here.

‘The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992’ by Jack Gilbert (1996)

I met Gilbert briefly on an old track in the mountains of Paros in 1981, just a moment of two strangers passing and nodding and saying three words. His poems are classical, but severely and lovingly contemporary too. Buy it here.

‘Avid Reader’ by Robert Gottlieb (2016)

This is the generous autobiography of the greatest editor of his time. I had an exciting friendship with him in the last years of his long life. He referred at one point in passing to Toni Morrison’s Beloved—“which I just happened to edit.” Well, yes, my good Lord Bob. Buy it here.

‘The Journal of Sir Walter Scott’ (1890)

These poignant and revealing journals cover the years after the financial disaster that engulfed Scott. Instead of being declared bankrupt, he made an arrangement with his creditors that he would write his way out of difficulty. He is 54 in 1825 when he begins his diary; it ends about six years later, with his early demise. Almost on the stroke of that midnight, the debts were fully paid off. Buy it here.

‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham (1998)

This was the book everyone seemed to be reading in New York when I was there in 1998. Which was an encouraging fact, because it is in a way a very austere work of art, surreally channeling Virginia Woolf, its glistening surfaces suggesting somehow very great depths. If there are bookshops in heaven, I’d like to think Virginia Woolf was reading it too. Buy it here.

‘The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There’ by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick

“When we talk about wealth, mainly we talk about billionaires,” said John Lanchester in The New Yorker. “But what if there were another group that, without drawing much attention, had grown collectively 13 times richer than the Forbes 400?” In their “brilliant” new study, economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick call attention to America’s Main Street millionaires, in particular the roughly 3 million owners of private businesses whose household net worth is at least $5 million. These are often stealth magnates—car dealers, beverage distributors, partners in law firms or medical practices—and they tend to have amassed their wealth through sustained hard work. “Unfortunately, there is a shadow side,” because they’ve also been so effective at wielding political clout that they’ve helped make life harder for many Americans. For now, “the best we can probably do about this concentration of wealth and power is to see it and name it, and that’s what Zidar and Zwick have done.”

The authors’ “eyeopening” account traces the rise of everywhere millionaires to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, said Greg Rosalsky in NPR.org. The bipartisan congressional bill cut tax rates, setting the top individual tax rate lower than the corporate tax rate. This triggered an explosion of so-called pass-through businesses, which pass profits directly to owners, who in turn pay taxes on that income at the lower rate. In 1980, pass-through businesses were small potatoes. “By 2011, they were generating more income than all traditional U.S. corporations combined—and accounting for most of the rise in the share of income flowing to the top 1%.” Zidar and Zwick, who identified this new millionaire class by diving deep into IRS records, have now attached their findings to “a colorful cast of characters,” including Chicago hot dog king Dick Portillo and other gogetters who started with nothing and made fortunes on surprising long-term bets.

“Zidar and Zwick tell this story with admirable clarity and precision,” said Nico Taylor in The Baffler. Though their “quasi-scholarly” language “can be bland at times,” it’s “a testament to the authors’ expository finesse that they manage to make fiscal history occasionally gripping.” Their book will be “of great interest” to readers who believe the rich now have the system rigged, said The Economist. As the authors point out, many everywhere millionaires enjoy the same luxuries as billionaires without attracting negative attention, and meanwhile they win new tax breaks and push through regulations that limit competition in their fields, including real estate sales, medicine, and law. But as critical as the book can be of millionaires, it “will appeal even more to those who hope to join their ranks.” Clearly, “much of the spoils of capitalism are still won by those who roll their sleeves up,” and “that is a great thing.”

‘The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia’ by Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker’s latest book “reads like a medical detective story,” said Carissa Wong in New Scientist. In a family of nine brothers and sisters, one after another of the siblings began exhibiting dramatic personality changes shortly before or after reaching the age of 40. Those afflicted became both apathetic and unable to read social cues, making them unrecognizable even to their spouses. Years passed before doctors solved the mystery, first attributing the behavioral changes to frontotemporal dementia (FTD), then linking that rare condition to a genetic mutation. But especially for anyone grappling with dementia in any form, there’s far more to The Vanishing Family than its initial mystery. “It is a tale of enduring love and devastating grief. It also offers a window into the neuroscience that could one day deliver a cure.”

Kolker, to his credit, “has written the biography of a family, making sure that each member is memorialized,” said Jennie Erin Smith in The Wall Street Journal. The siblings’ mother had FTD first, but her behavioral changes were attributed to alcoholism, and she died at 62 before anyone suspected otherwise. Christy, the first sibling to experience symptoms, was not yet 40 when, in the mid-1990s, she was dismissed from her executive position and soon after lost her husband and all interest in her children. The family’s story is mostly told from the perspective of Barb, the youngest sibling, who pushes for answers but puts off obtaining her own genetic test results. Kolker, author of the 2020 best seller Hidden Valley Road, once again proves to be “a keen interpreter of the science and subjective experience of mental illness.”

“For Kolker, the slipperiness of identity has been a recurrent theme,” said Julia M. Klein in The Atlantic. Here, he forces us to consider whether any of us have a fixed personality if FTD or Alzheimer’s can rewire it. Even so, his greatest achievement is “once again reportorial,” because “he has persuaded nearly every family member, the sick and the well, to confide in him.” His findings belie his book’s title. As healthy siblings care for the afflicted, the sprawling family “becomes, if anything, more unified— bonded, however imperfectly, by love.

When the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was revealed today, “all eyes in the literary world” were firmly fixed on Stockholm, said Deutsche Welle.

But the announcement of 76-year-old Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson as this year’s laureate marked the end of a lengthy, secretive selection process that began more than a year ago. And the world’s most prestigious literary award has, according to Euronews, “generated more controversies” than any of the other Nobel Prizes.

Who chooses the Nobel Prize laureates in literature?

Awards are chosen by the Swedish Academy, founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. The 18 members, known as “De Aderton” (The Eighteen), are currently made up of “distinguished Swedish writers, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and a prominent jurist”, according to the Nobel Prize website. They have tenure for life.

How do nominations work?

In September last year, the Academy’s “Nobel Committee” sent out hundreds of invitation forms to individuals and organisations eligible to submit nominations. These include literature and linguistics professors at universities, previous Nobel laureates in literature, and the heads of writers’ associations in various countries. The committee can also add names, such as past laureates. The list “can reach 200 names per year”, Gisele Sapiro, research director and Nobel Prize expert, told DW.

Those who don’t receive an invitation but are still qualified to submit nominations can do so – but no one can nominate themselves. That said, “there’s a tradition of writers lobbying for the prize by giving talks in Gothenburg or Stockholm and then flirting with Academy members over drinks”, said the Financial Times.

The Committee screens submissions after the January deadline and, over the next few months, “whittles down the nominations” to five candidates. The 18 then read and assess the work over the summer, confer in September, and vote in early October. The winner must receive more than half the votes. He or she takes home 12 million Swedish kronor (about £910,000), as well as a “lifetime of laurels”, said LitHub. But the public – and nominees – don’t learn which authors made the shortlist until 50 years later. Some authors are considered year after year, but never win.

What are they looking for?

In his will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the prize should go to the writer of the “most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”. The Academy “spent decades puzzling over what ‘ideal’ meant”, said the FT, before “quietly dropping the criterion”.

Last year, the prize went to Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art”. The prize is given to a writer’s body of work, rather than one book.

According to Sapiro, the Academy is looking for ambitious, influential literature that has spawned a new literary movement. The work must also be “universal, being able to transcend its own culture”, she told DW. Translations are key: most laureates are translated into English, French and German – “these three languages are the most important”. It’s also a “major advantage” if nominees have already won other prestigious literary awards, she said, such as the International Man Booker Prize.

So far, only 33 out of 122 laureates have come from outside Europe. Only about 15% of winners have been women, but since 2018, the prize has alternated between a man and a woman. Genre doesn’t seem to matter: in 2016, Bob Dylan won the prize for his song lyrics.

Why is it so controversial?

Possibly the most controversial winner was Peter Handke in 2019. The Austrian writer was a “known denier of the Bosnian genocide”, as well as a “close supporter” of former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, said Euronews. Hundreds protested, and several countries either condemned the award or boycotted the ceremony. Even Bob Dylan’s fans were “baffled” by his selection.

“The prize is ritually mocked,” said the FT’s Simon Kuper. Because achievement in literature is more subjective than in the sciences, the decision “reliably angers critics”. There is also a “comic discrepancy between the weight of the prize and the parochialism of the judges”. Some of the 18 are “obscure even in Sweden”. They have also awarded eight Nobels to Sweden: more than Asia, Africa or Latin America have each received.

But the prize still “shapes the global canon – even if the globe can push back”. Dylan’s award may have been “ridiculed”, but it “sparked a global debate on what constitutes literature”. The prize can also “turbocharge sales”, which benefits small presses that publish literature in translation. It also gets authors’ names trending on social media, far beyond their countries. In a world where reading is “in decline”, the prize matters more than ever.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Spooky season is all about getting your thrills, and for the literary-inclined, there is plenty afoot this month. Notable releases include a novel about police brutality, Barbara Kingsolver's return, 1980s fiction, and a deep dive into the very real specter of artificial intelligence.

‘The AGI Chronicles’ by Kevin Roose

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist at The New York Times, interviewed “over 150 insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind” for this deep dive into the “race to reach the next frontier” of AI: a “system that can outdo humans at nearly anything,” said the Times. (out now, $29, Macmillan Publishers, Amazon)

‘The Occidental Book of the Dead’ by T. Geronimo Johnson

A cop killing a teenager “sparks an epic disquisition on race in the U.S.” in T. Geronimo Johnson’s forthcoming novel, said Kirkus Reviews. It is a “swing-for-the-fences novel,” both a “gripping procedural” and a “high-literary study of American bigotry.” (out now, $34, Harper Collins Publishers, Amazon)

‘Partita’ by Barbara Kingsolver

Livia’s “staid collegiate career” as a “scholarship piano prodigy” was upended by an affair with a “blue-collar Socialist.” Decades later, “he wants to reconnect,” said The Boston Globe. Kingsolver’s “still got the goods in her assured tenth novel.” (out now, $32, Harper Collins Publishers, Amazon)

‘Peck & Peck’ by Bonnie Garmus

“Peck & Peck” caters to readers who adore literary fiction set in “1980s New York City” that follows “young people with literary ambitions,” said The Skimm. The novel promises to be a “tender, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining coming-of-adulthood story.” (Oct. 13, $30, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

Whitney Houston was a cultural icon who sold more than 200 million records.

Yet her achievements “were, and remain, obscured by public interest in her private life: her sexuality, her relationships, her relationship with drugs”, which ultimately contributed to her untimely death in 2012 at the age of just 48, said Liam Kelly in The Telegraph.

This, in part, is what makes her such a “compelling character” for Emily Lordi’s new biography, “Holding Lightning: the Life, Loves and Art of Whitney Houston”.

The version of Houston’s story that has played out time and again in the many books and documentaries produced since her death is of the “wholesome choirgirl” destroyed by her marriage to bad boy singer Bobby Brown in 1992, said The Times’ Victoria Segal. The tale is one of a “sparkling pop princess sliding catastrophically off the rails and into the drug abuse that claimed her health, her voice and, ultimately, her life”.

Refusing to “reduce Houston’s story to another ‘good girl gone bad’ narrative”, Lordi, a critic and professor of English at Vanderbilt University, instead “presents a pluralistic take on her life” in which the singer’s “queerness, drug use and eccentricities are not dismissed as aberrations (as they were in her lifetime) but rather seen in the wider context of her unique talent and the pressures placed on her to embody Black excellence”, said Priya Elan in The Guardian.

Going even further, Lordi “repeatedly and persuasively” makes the case that while she almost never wrote her own material, Houston was an artistic “genius”, said The New York Times culture editor Leah Greenblatt.

While Lordi’s analysis can “tip into academic mode, and she sometimes overreaches in her attempt to make the singer all things to all people”, the book “works eloquently to elevate and re-reframe an icon, and in its best moments also allows her the grace of something she longed for and rarely got to be: life-size”.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the Botswana-set No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, whose 27 books have sold more than 40 million copies. In the latest, The Big Cats Dance Party, a high-profile case falls to a novice sleuth while the agency’s founder is away.

‘A Pattern Language’ by Christopher Alexander (1977)

Alexander was a visionary professor of architecture at Berkeley. Here, he and several colleagues set out the principles of sympathetic design as an antidote to the brutalism of the late 20th century. You can use this book if you are designing a city, a building, or just arranging the furniture in a room or the shrubs in your garden. Buy it here.

‘Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957’ by W.H. Auden (1966)

I never tire of Auden’s poems, especially “In Praise of Limestone” and the lovely, haunting “The More Loving One.” Auden remains as relevant in our troubled times as he was in his heyday. And he brings the same consolation with his wise, humane words. Buy it here.

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark (1961)

“My pupils,” said Miss Brodie, “are the crème de la crème.” Beware of a teacher who says that sort of thing. Jean Brodie was a fascist, one of her charges eventually says, and she was. Spark, a writer of the first rank, brought her beautifully to life in this moving, rather sad novel of Edinburgh in the 1930s. Buy it here.

‘The Sword of Honour Trilogy’ by Evelyn Waugh (1952–61)

This trilogy is in my view Waugh’s masterpiece. It tells the story of Guy Crouchback and his experiences in the Second World War. Waugh was a magnificent writer, and his prose has a rare gravity and balance. Here he tells a poignant story, but one that has moments of memorable humor. Apthrop, an important character, is Waugh’s greatest comic creation. Buy it here.

‘Excellent Women’ by Barbara Pym (1952)

Pym was another Jane Austen. Her small-scale novels are full of witty observations. She focuses on the lives of people living on the margins of other, larger lives. Excellent Women is one of her best novels, a little gem. Buy it here.

‘The Spy and the Traitor’ by Ben Macintyre (2018)

Macintyre’s book about Oleg Gordievsky is quite simply the most exciting book I have ever read. Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer, passed on information to the West for years. The story of his exfiltration from Moscow is utterly engrossing. Gordievsky probably saved us from nuclear annihilation. Buy it here.

‘An Unexpected Life: A Memoir’ by Gloria Steinem

“An Unexpected Life is filled with lines that now feel prophetic,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. When the feminist activist and icon died at 92 in early September, her newest memoir was three weeks from publication, making it all the more poignant when a reader comes across lines such as “Being remembered with love is the best form of immortality.” Steinem was, she wrote here, still working on the causes she believed in and expecting to live to 100. But she was also aware she had an obligation, as a leader running short on time, to remind younger allies of progress made in her lifetime, including in the opening of countless professions to women and in making domestic violence far less invisible. At its best, An Unexpected Life “reads as a nudge to younger generations to keep up the good fight, to notice the wins where they happen, and to not get discouraged.”

“The striking thing about An Unexpected Life is how bland it is,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Steinem didn’t lack for good material. As a journalist in her 20s, she went undercover as a Playboy bunny and trailed the Beatles on their first U.S. tour. She also ran a youth group funded by the CIA in the years before she co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. “In her heyday, Steinem had zip,” authoring such memorable lines as “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” But here she smothers even potentially great anecdotes with bromides. After recalling how she was once bitten by a rat during her Ohio childhood and had to hitchhike to a hospital in the middle of the night, she counsels readers not to let rats remain “unseen,” writing: “If we share our experiences, we begin to discover that we are not alone.”

In the book’s first half, at least, “one is reminded of the improbability of her journey,” said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. “Raised on instability,” Steinem grew up “remarkably free” from the constraints placed on so many other women, and once she assumed the role of an activist, she was “the real thing,” in it for neither the attention nor the money. She shares that she saved so little well into midlife that she worried she’d one day be sleeping in the New York City subway—and jokes that she’d have taken up organizing the other bag ladies. For much of her life, though, she “had a very clear idea of what she was supposed to be doing,” and “my God she did it right to the end.” She mentions at one point having jeans older than many people she was working with. “We should all be so lucky; what a life.”

‘Roll the Calls: A Memoir’ by Ari Emanuel

“I don’t know why Ari Emanuel wrote a memoir, even after reading it,” said Sam Wasson in Air Mail. Yes, Emanuel is a powerful Hollywood agent who’s so famously explosive that he inspired Entourage’s Ari Gold. He’d also seem to have great stories to share. But there are few such tales in this instant best seller, either because Emanuel doesn’t know what he’s fighting for or because his business is now more about mergers than deals that get movies made. Written in “a punchy, give-’em-hell style that strains to evoke Robert Evans’ classic The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Roll the Calls is “relentless and fun,” but “self-consciously so”—the kind of book that thinks there’s more power in the words “F--- you” when the phrase is broken into two paragraphs.

Emanuel spends much of the book “trying to justify his unrelenting rage and appetite for revenge,” said Maxwell Adler in Vanity Fair. He traces his anger back to childhood, when he was a bullied suburban Chicago special ed student whose dyslexia prevented him from keeping up with older brothers Zeke, now a prominent scientist, and Rahm, a current Democratic presidential hopeful. Ari credits his appetite for battle with the success he’s since achieved in a career that hadn’t even peaked when, in 2024, the agency he co-founded was valued at $13 billion. Fittingly, he also now runs a sports and entertainment conglomerate that owns both the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).

“Roll the Calls is being sold as a Hollywood insider’s tell-all,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph (U.K.). Problem is, Emanuel’s still working on his clients’ behalf, so while he freely ridicules rival agents and certain rival industry titans, “we hear nothing about the challenges of representing Mark Wahlberg or Oprah Winfrey or Donald Trump.” Judging from Emanuel’s memoir, “nothing sticks in his memory better than who got the upper hand during boardroom merger negotiations (usually himself) or who swore the most (himself).” Still, I’ll concede he’s a bit scary. “The very idea of him reading this lightly negative review brings a cold sweat to the back of my neck.”

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Emily Ruskovich is the author of the novel Idaho, a prize-winning 2017 best seller. Her new short-story collection, Nightjar, includes “Owl,” her O. Henry Award–winning tale about a fur trapper caring for his wife after she’s been shot in an encounter with four adolescent boys.

‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

The most foundational novel of my life. A flooded house, a derailed train, a lake haunted by tragedies both personal and mythic. This is the most beautiful depiction of childhood and sisterhood I’ve ever read. Buy it here.

‘About, Above, Around’ by Mark Mayer (2025)

In this weird, gorgeous story collection, which is as funny as it is heartbreaking, Mayer has set out to illuminate the feeling, the life, inherent in the smallest increments of language. He succeeds brilliantly. I will never look at “after” or “by” or especially “near” the same way. Buy it here.

‘The Lost Journals of Sacajewea’ by Debra Magpie Earling (2023)

Earling gives a voice to the young girl Sacajewea, creating a shattering first-person account of her enslavement, her grief, and her endurance, re-centering her in a brutal history. The language of this novel is so alive, so singular and devastating, that I’ll never forget it. Buy it here.

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Kathy H. is the young narrator of this intensely haunting novel about love, art, childhood, friendship, grief, and the very definition of humanity. At the heart of this speculative novel is an unspeakable atrocity that serves as the premise of Kathy’s life. Yet it is a childhood love that guides the narrative to its brilliant end. Buy it here.

‘Salvage the Bones’ by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

Esch is 15 years old, motherless, poor, living in rural Mississippi. Twelve days before Hurricane Katrina strikes, she is throwing up from morning sickness and watching her big brother fret over his beloved pit bull’s newborn pups, which are dying one by one. The story is a moving and raw depiction of a lasting familial love. Buy it here.

‘What the Ice Gets’ by Melinda Mueller (2000)

A Homeric retelling of Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to reach the South Pole. Mueller was a biology teacher from Seattle who found her own way into the incredible story of the Endurance. She wrote her book-length poem in response to her battle with cancer. When my husband gave me the book years ago, he said, “This book is to ice what Housekeeping is to water.” Buy it here.

‘Exit Party’ by Emily St. John Mandel

“Let’s hope that Emily St. John Mandel’s gift for writing prophetic fiction is overrated,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR .org. Station Eleven, the Canadian novelist’s 2014 breakthrough, anticipated the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. Unsettlingly, her “ingenious, eerie, and complex” new work opens in 2031 in the immediate wake of the collapse of the United States. Fighting by then has subsided enough that Ari Waker, a woman in Los Angeles who’s recently completed a well-earned 18-year prison stint, feels safe enough to attend a party. There, by some strange accident, two guests from an alternative world materialize while the host vanishes into that same other dimension, where the U.S. isn’t violently riven but is instead a placid authoritarian state with a citizenry under constant surveillance.

Despite its science fiction framework, Exit Party, “like all the best stories,” is character driven, said Adam Begley in The Atlantic. In its first half, we follow Ari as she rapidly reinvents herself again and again, graduating from dishwasher to gunrunner, trophy wife, philanthropist, and Paris-based art collector. The second half throws us into the other timeline, where Ari’s doppelgänger, known as Ibari, is a high-ranking undercover operative willing to disappear fellow citizens that pose challenges to the authoritarian government. Though these twinned protagonists act immorally, Mandel makes both Ari and Ibari compelling and sympathetic. And as in her previous novels, “the underlying theme is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it.”

With its shifting time frames and stories nesting within stories, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter, “Exit Party sometimes feels dazzling and sometimes feels like it was composed by a squirrel with a Ph.D.” Still “it grows more satisfying with every page” as we follow Ari and Ibari’s misadventures. “The only worldbuilder more efficient than Mandel may be God,” because she sketches each of her parallel dystopias in “a few deft strokes,” then immerses us in individual lives made complex by the particular circumstances in which those lives unfold. It’s not always easy to understand exactly what’s happening in Exit Plan, and “anybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts.” Ari struggles to understand how its two worlds connect, and as events in one world echo events in the other, so will many readers. “Mandel has engineered this uncanny novel to spark déjà vu, to send you flipping back to passages you read too quickly, to drive you mad. But what a way to go!”

‘Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy’ by Ben Macintyre

“Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers,” said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. With his new account about a Soviet spy who may have altered history, the author of Operation Mincemeat, which was adapted into a 2021 movie, “has done it again.” In 1981, KGB major Vladimir Kuzichkin offered to slip secrets about Soviet meddling in post-revolution Iran to British intelligence, but not because of ideology or money. It was because he suffered from erectile dysfunction and hoped Western doctors could help. Might Iran have fallen into Soviet hands had Viagra already existed? Macintyre floats that “audacious” thought, but his tale doesn’t rest on such speculation.

Think of Redwood as “an artfully constructed nonfiction equivalent to one of John le Carré’s most accomplished novels,” said Andrew Nagorski in The Wall Street Journal. The author traces the life paths that brought Kuzichkin and his MI6 handler, Ian McCredie, together, making them allies in documenting how Moscow was seeking to use the communist Tudeh Party to topple Ayatollah Khomeini and install its own puppet leader. MI6, with the CIA’s approval, then handed this intel to Khomeini, knowing full well that he might kill or lock up thousands of Tudeh members Kuzichkin had identified. And that’s what happened, strengthening the ayatollah’s grip on power. By then, Kuzichkin had been spirited away to the U.K., where he died of a heart attack years later next to an empty bottle of vodka.

“There’s much to like in Redwood,” said Boris Starling in The Telegraph (U.K.). But “there are two minor flaws.” First, the background narrative, with its abundance of characters that don’t merit being named, “seems at times unnecessarily complex.” Second, the entire story is less exciting and fraught than the one Macintyre told in 2018’s masterful The Spy and the Traitor. Still, Macintyre remains “incapable of writing a dull sentence,” specializing in “deliciously wry” turns of phrase. In Kuzichkin, he’s also found another “wildly unforgettable” character.

Annie Dillard was just 28 when she published a collection of spare, meditative essays drawn from a year’s worth of wandering and watching in the wilds of Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. “A meteorological journal of the mind,” she called the book, in which she ruminated on plants, muskrats, butterflies, and the essential paradox of a natural world defined by beauty “tangled in a rapture with violence.” The 1974 book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was a sensation, winning Dillard a Pulitzer and a reputation as one of her generation’s top literary voices. Other best sellers included the autobiography An American Childhood and The Writing Life, a discourse on creativity. While the natural world was her abiding theme, she rejected the tag “nature writer,” calling herself instead a theologian pondering the mysteries of God. “I walk out,” she wrote, “I see some event that would otherwise be utterly missed and lost, or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”

Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, she “grew up in affluent circumstances,” said The Washington Post. A devout reader, she was also “an admitted rebel,” suspended from her private school for smoking. To “smooth off her rough edges,” her parents sent her to what’s now Hollins University, a women’s college near Roanoke. There she married her creative-writing professor, and though the marriage would end, she kept his last name. She wrote a master’s thesis on Thoreau’s classic Walden, then began “exploring the nearby mountains and streams.” After Tinker’s success she was “overwhelmed” by attention, said The New York Times, some of it built on the allure of “a photogenic young woman” probing a subject previously the “province of men with beards.” Repelled, she fled to rural Washington state, then to Connecticut, where she spent 21 years teaching at Wesleyan University.

Over the years she became known “for her tremendous range,” said The Guardian, publishing poems, journalism, essays, and novels. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal; soon after, she announced on her website that she could no longer travel and planned to “read and concentrate” at her home on Cape Cod. Her retreat was in line with a message she often told students: that the creative life was an all-or-nothing proposition. If you wish to be a writer, she said, “you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Bring on the burning stoves and the hot-air blast of a roaring oven. Autumn’s new cookbooks are an inspiriting combination of history, practicality, design and, of course, endless attractive recipes.

‘Boucherie’ by Chase Cormier

One-time butcher, now a scholar, Chase Cormier is an ideal documentarian of the indispensable south Louisiana culinary tradition known as boucherie. The term, deep in the rural stretches of the Pelican State, can signify the art of butchering; it can also denote the raucous gatherings in which a pig — or pigs — is slaughtered and its parts processed and preserved for future sustenance.

Cormier is “not sentimental,” said Kitchen Arts & Letters in an email review. Instead, he tells the story of how meat processing has changed over the centuries and how the idea of Cajun food has been “shaped, sold and reinvented.” Personal and regarded from a keen bird’s-eye view, “Boucherie” is a pocket-sized book that has a grand vision. (out now, $23, LSU Press, Amazon)

‘Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide’ by Debbie Berne

Beauty is not strictly in a successful recipe but also in how the best cookbooks are presented. “Cookbooking,” by designer Debbie Berne who designed innumerable cookbooks and died last December, is a “savory tribute to cookbooks as aesthetic objects,” said Publisher’s Weekly.

The book’s range is astonishing. It touches on iconic tomes like “The Joy of Cooking,” dissects homespun community cookbooks often assembled by-hand and draws the thread from TV show-themed cookbooks to the current wash of food — and very much not-food — celebrity cookbooks. “Cookbooking” presents the finished product with a “lighthearted tone and loose structure,” a “colorful celebration” of a cookbook factor that the genre’s lovers sometimes take for granted. (out now, $30, Hardie Grant, Amazon)

‘Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!: Foraging and Vegan Recipes with Black Forager’ by Alexis Nikole Nelson with Jeanelle Hayner Olson

If you know the Black Forager on social media, you love her — or you should. Alexis Nikole Nelson, the freewheeling, insanely knowledgeable person beyond the handle, debuts her first cookbook, “Happy Snacking Don’t Die,” and as the title intimates, the book is a bounty of charming encouragement and cheeky asides. The “joy Nelson injects into the book makes foraging approachable,” said Emily Conover at ScienceNews.

You will learn that the fruits of the linden tree are akin to an earthier chocolate and that “practicality, safety and play” can coexist, said Bettina Makalintal at Eater. All this while you fumble your way into better trying understand and, yes, consume the plant world gloriously sprouting everywhere around you. (out now, $35, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Kincentricity: Connecting to Nature with American Indian Food Traditions’ by Enrique Salmón

Enrique Salmón, a Rarámuri (Tarahumara) scholar and professor in the San Francisco Bay Area, trumpets his book’s central tenet, “kincentricity,” as an “Indigenous worldview emphasizing the interconnectedness of all living beings and our responsibility to be good stewards of the planet we share,” said Jamie Feldmar at Saveur.

The book’s introduction, subtitled “Sharing Breath with Our Relatives,” takes the reader on a wander through the kincentricity’s complementary notion, iwigara, the “total interconnectedness and integration of all life in the Sierra Madre [Mountains], physical and spiritual.” You acquire, through Salmón’s clear sense of place, an ethnography of the people tied to this land and then glean, in the ensuing chapters on native foodstuffs like huckleberries, mesquite and stinging nettles, that no matter where you live, plucking the thread that links all life is a right and proper way to exist on this planet. (out now, $35, Rizzoli, Amazon)

‘No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World’ by Meherwan Irani with Jamie Feldmar

Meherwan Irani, owner of a few Chai Pani restaurants in the southern United States along with the spice company Spicewalla, is one of a number of Indian American chefs who have noted the strong parallels between the cooking of the Indian subcontinent and that of the South. In Irani’s debut cookbook, “No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World,” he drives the point home, with a “healthy mix of expected recipes and those likely new to most Americans, allowing readers to explore a wider variety of Indian cuisine,” said Aaron Pahl at Library Journal.

Collards, black-eyed peas and chiles are a few of the through lines between the cuisines. Irani sometimes rams them together in innovative ways. His Sloppy Jai is his adaptation of keema, a spiced ground meat dish, served like a Sloppy Joe as a thrilling, messy sandwich. Proof that “Indian cuisine is not only approachable, but that it’s not that different from what you’re already cooking and eating,” said Alana Al-Hatlani at Southern Living. (out now, $40, Ten Speed Press, Amazon)

‘Gather Around My Table: Simple, Flavorful Recipes from My Global Pantry’ by Kay Chun

Imagine, if you will, those translucent shrimp dumplings, har gow, you snag as a dim sum cart wheels past you. These, though, are dressed with butter and parmesan, like the liveliest comfort pasta you have ever eaten. Welcome to Kay Chun’s recipe-creating world, where you can use her book “Gather Around My Table” as your guide.

There is an effortlessness and an inevitability to how Chun creates dishes. She employs “low-lift but flavor-packed flourishes,” said Makalintal at Eater, to recipes like chicories in a caper-raisin vinaigrette and sticky date snacking cake with the addition of prunes for a double wallop of dried-fruit vigor. All the things you ever wanted to eat, in Chun’s capable hands, were there all along. (Oct. 6, $40, Knopf, Amazon)

‘Daily Dessert: Treats on Repeat’ by Caroline Schiff

Dessert-making need not always be like climbing Kilimanjaro. Sometimes it can be a stroll across a hillock, and celebrated New York City pastry chef Caroline Schiff has written a “book about making baking less annoying and more chill, a boon for anyone who would love baked goods more often but hates the thought of all the fuss,” said Makalintal at Eater.

One steady aspect of frippery-free baking is desserts that keep. Expect clementine snacking cake, granola treated with the flavors of halvah, malted milk chocolate truffles and rosemary-hazelnut shortbreads. A sweet treat should be both for now and later because, as Schiff wrote in the book’s introduction, “around the globe, dessert is, well, just that — daily. Many countries and cultures have joyfully and intentionally built the practice into their everyday lives,” Now it’s your turn. (Oct. 13, $35, Abrams, Amazon)

‘East to East: Recipes and Stories from Mumbai to New York’ by Rachel Gurjar

Forever toggling between the tastes of Mumbai and New York, the recipes of Gurjar, a former editor at Bon Appétit, are like skyscrapers: big-flavored with dependable foundations.

Burrata, served with pistachios and tamarind-glazed roasted grapes, yelps why it will forever be craveable. A chicken Caesar salad receives a deep plane facelift by treating the bird kebab-style. Yes, those are the invigorating spices of chai in that espresso martini and that taco bowl is loaded not with seasoning packet-laced ground beef but spunky lamb keema. The familiar has never been quite so promisingly electroshocked. (Oct. 13, $35, Chronicle Books, Amazon)

The acronym Mice (money, ideology, coercion, ego) is sometimes used to describe what motivates people to betray their countries, said Oliver Bullough in The Guardian. But in Ben Macintyre’s enthralling new “work of true-espionage”, a fresh motivation emerges: erectile dysfunction.

Vladimir Kuzichkin was a KGB agent stationed in Tehran in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. With the West “on the back foot” there, the Soviets saw an “opportunity to spread their influence south, to a strategic and oil-rich country”.

Kuzichkin’s role was “to further this aim by distributing money, arms and encouragement” to Iran’s communist party. Yet it was a job he loathed. Stressed and under constant surveillance, he was also frustrated by the corruption and incompetence of his colleagues, who’d celebrate each tiny success with “vast quantities of vodka”. All this took a toll on his marriage (to Galina), including on his performance in the bedroom.

Convinced that his problems were caused by an “overly tight foreskin”, Kuzichkin resolved to be circumcised, said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. But to prevent his “impairment” becoming known to his colleagues, he wanted the operation performed in the West.

And so, in October 1981, he entered the British Embassy in Tehran, and offered to “spy for Britain” – thus becoming, as Macintyre notes, the “first spy in history to demand, as the price of defection, the removal of his foreskin”.

Trivial though his motivations seemed, Kuzichkin’s actions had profound consequences, said James Owen in The Times. The Soviets were planning to foment a communist “coup against the ayatollahs, backed up by an armed invasion”; had this come to fruition, the US might have responded with tactical nuclear weapons.

The intelligence Kuzichkin provided alerted the UK and the US to the Soviets’ plan; MI6 informed the ayatollahs, who savagely clamped down on Iran’s communist party, ending any possibility of a coup.

The victory, however, was double-edged, said Clare Mulley in The Spectator. For in administering the “coup de grâce to Soviet aspirations”, MI6 “bolstered a murderous, fundamentalist regime” – with consequences that are still playing out today.

Redwood – named after MI6’s inadvertently humorous codename for the tall Russian – is an “enjoyable caper”, full of “twists, turns, desires, betrayals and unexpected outcomes”. And it serves as a useful reminder that “history is not solely written by great powers”; in some cases, the “very personal choices, desires and decisions” of a flawed individual can be equally important.

Booker Prize judge and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker said it was a “surprise” that four novels written by men have ended up on this year’s shortlist of six – because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”. The male authors still in the running for the prestigious 2026 literary award are those who are able to “rethink their roles”.

‘Masculine authority in crisis’

This year’s shortlisted authors span a “generational arc”, stretching from 40-year-old Rebecca Perry to the “81-year-old veteran of experimental speculative fiction” M. John Harrison, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Men outnumber women but the “novels’ subject matter” is “more revealing” than any author’s “identity characteristics”. An “overarching theme” emerges: “masculine authority in crisis – and discomfort”. These are tales of fathers, sons and husbands who are “struggling to inhabit the roles, structures and stories that are supposed to contain them”.

Luke Kennard’s brilliantly funny campus novel, “Black Bag”, sees an out-of-work actor paid to lurk inside a “leather suit bag, as status and confidence evaporate”, while Douglas Stuart “examines the weight of male expectation” in “John of John”, a story about a young gay art student who returns to his repressive home in the Hebrides. In “The Disappearers”, Marlon James charts how masculinity is “brutally policed” in a murderous homophobic attack in 1980s Jamaica. And “The End of Everything", Harrison’s “unsettling” post-apocalyptic tale, “tests the masculine survivalist fantasy of practical competence”.

The female authors on the list also turn their lens on male characters: with “domestic precision”, Elizabeth Strout portrays an increasingly isolated husband in “The Things We Never Say”, while in “May We Feed the King”, Perry follows a “reluctant medieval monarch who inherits the ultimate ‘great man’ role without wanting it”.

None of the books fulfill expectations of what a “male” novel is meant to be. Instead, they reject the very things that male protagonists would once have taken “for granted”, from sexual legitimacy and paternal authority to economic security and “mastery of the world”.

‘Are men OK?’

Last year’s winner, David Szalay’s “Flesh”, a rags-to-riches story about a Hungarian man catapulted into the world of the super-wealthy, sparked much debate about “literary fiction’s renewed interest in masculinity”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. This year’s list will only intensify the discussion, “the theme of which might be summed up as: are men OK?”

Some of the writers are “playfully experimental” and I’m glad to see Kennard’s “howlingly funny” book made the cut. His is the “most purely enjoyable” read and contains the “single best scene of any of the novels on the list (if you’ve read it you’ll know the one I’m talking about)”. I found the politics in Strout’s book about a history teacher living through “the second coming” of Donald Trump “too unsubtle”, and Perry and Kennard, “the juniors in the pack”, have “better novels to come”. If “seduced by heft”, the judges might opt for James’ “gruelling saga” but “I suspect it’s the straightforward page-turning jeopardy” of Stuart’s “John of John” that will scoop the top prize.

I’m betting on “British oddball” Harrison, said Lucy Thynne in The Telegraph. This is the first time the octogenarian cult sci-fi writer has got “so much as a look-in” at the Booker, and, if he takes the gong, he’ll be the “oldest winner in its history”. His “stunningly weird vision of the collapse of England” is a “cut above” the other contenders. “I would love it to win”.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

Eriq La Salle, the Emmy-winning former co-star of the TV series ER, is also the author of an ongoing thriller series. The latest entry, Laws of Solomon, follows hitman Solomon Nangobi to Los Angeles, where the former child soldier takes a boy in danger under his wing. Below are his six favorite books.

‘The Godfather’ by Mario Puzo (1969)

The tale was most famously turned into the film by Francis Ford Coppola, but I’ve always preferred the book. The themes Puzo explores, most notably if evil is inherited or learned, is one that I grapple with constantly in my own work. Buy it here.

‘Man on Fire’ by Philip Nicholson (1980)

This tale of a washed-up ex-mercenary who must protect a young girl after a bodyguard job goes wrong has all the ingredients for a great thriller story: gritty action, brutal killings, and untrustworthy characters. But what makes me love it is that it also has all the hallmarks of a deep character study. Buy it here.

‘The 48 Laws of Power’ by Robert Greene (1998)

This is a nonfiction book, a collection of tips about obtaining and exercising power drawn from the counsel of Machiavelli, The Art of War, etc. One of the most fascinating books there is on “survival” in human society, it is vicious and uncompromising. It’s also uncomfortable to think that people who study this book may be enacting its tenets on you or those around you. Buy it here.

‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison (1987)

I have many favorite Toni Morrison books, so it was difficult to choose just one. Beloved tells the story of a former slave whose home is haunted by a malevolent spirit, inferred to be the woman’s murdered baby daughter. Sometimes storytelling can convey a historical truth more subtly than actual history, and Morrison does so tenfold here. Buy it here.

‘The Cartel’ by Don Winslow (2015)

In this heavily researched and bloody novel, Winslow chronicles one decade—2004 to 2014—in the Mexican-American drug wars. The book is an insanely relevant bloodbath, with a “ripped from the headlines” feeling that sticks to you long after you put it down. Buy it here.

‘The Winter of Frankie Machine’ by Don Winslow (2006)

This Winslow novel, about a retired hitman, is softer than many of his others, and I love it for that reason. It’s a sad, lonely tale drenched in both blood and the L.A. sun. Its noir style, decades older even than Frankie Machine, is one that I sought to achieve in the first few pages of Laws of Solomon. Buy it here.

‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James

“Why not just say it?” asked Dwight Garner in The New York Times. With his sixth book in an already decorated career, Marlon James “has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” At 600- plus pages, The Disappearers is “a maximalist’s banquet” constructed from a simple story premise: In 1988 Jamaica, several closeted gay men are rehearsing a play in a house in Kingston when a homophobic mob storms in, killing one victim, blinding another, brutally beating the rest, and leaving the survivors forever changed. Still, “it’s hard to talk about this novel because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up,” whether you’re interested in what James, a Jamaican native, has to say about violence, sex, pop culture, gay feeling, revenge, exile, or fathers and sons. The book “sank knives deep into my heart,” and “I’m still in recovery from it.”

Two young men, Eddy Porteus and Jordan Brown, hold the center of this “unforgettable” work, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Eddy and Jordan aren’t friends exactly,” and up until the mob attack, their experiences of Jamaica’s virulent homophobia vary significantly. But when two other members of the acting troupe vanish after leaving the hospital, they team up to find them. Throughout the book, as in his previous novels, James “invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. And as the story drifts to Miami, London, New York, and back to Kingston again, it’s held together by James’ passion for the era’s pop culture and his characters’ will to survive in the face of hatred. Thanks to its sweep and power, it’s a novel that “will be read decades from now, pored over in seminars and bookmarked on subway commutes.”

While “there’s no denying” that The Disappearers is a great novel, it’s “also an ordeal,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. It “aspires to sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality,” and in that, it’ll succeed. But “James’ commitment to erotic realism, to the mechanics of oral and anal sex, voluntary and violent, is total and relentless,” and the book is in part “an encyclopedia of abuse and degradation.” I finished it “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it.” Even so, “what’s most surprising, given the book’s abiding terrors, is how James inches it erratically toward the light,” providing late glimpses of a few gay characters who not only survive but thrive. It’s easy to imagine that this “incomparable” work will be a beacon to more than a few young readers enduring violent hatred wherever it arises today.

‘American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump’ by Kai Bird

“I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel,” said Laura Miller in Slate, “and I’m not sure how I feel about that.” The book’s subject, lawyer Roy Cohn, was a mobbed-up liar and cheater who helped manufacture the postwar Red Scare, assisted in sending Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair, demonized homosexuals despite being gay himself, and eventually mentored the young Donald Trump. Bird, who co- authored American Prometheus, the award-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, this time teamed with his researcher wife, Susan Goldmark, to create a book that’s “a cornucopia of mid-century sleaze and addictive for just that reason.” It’s a story packed with “Mafia hits and blackmail and election tampering,” and because Trump’s resentful populism mirrors Cohn’s, it’s a tale that’s “turned out to be seminal in American politics.”

“In Bird’s telling, the parallels between Cohn and Trump begin with their childhoods,” said Kim Phillips-Fein in The Atlantic. Both grew up in outer-borough New York City, and both had well-connected fathers who helped launch their careers. After the Bronx-bred Cohn helped prosecute the Rosenbergs, he teamed with U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy to mount a sweeping anti-Communist hunt. When a backlash sent him back to New York, he was repeatedly indicted but eluded criminal conviction. After meeting Trump in 1973, he schooled the future president in certain rules of the power game, including answering every attack with a counterattack and never admitting wrongdoing.

In his long-ago heyday, “Roy Cohn made for good copy,” said Philip Terzian in The Wall Street Journal. But while Bird’s book reviews Cohn’s colorful career in great detail, “all the entertaining stories are spoiled in the service of an underlying thesis—Cohn as linchpin of modern conservative politics—that grows less persuasive with repetition.” Cohn in fact held national power only briefly, and his transactional later friendship with Trump “scarcely” qualifies as formative. Clearly, while Cohn’s historic significance remains slight, “his status as a menacing specter in the minds of liberal journalists has only grown.”

Revenge, for Charles Spencer, is “best served in a primetime television slot with the merest hint of a smirk and, where appropriate, a few tears”, said The Times.

Princess Diana’s brother, the 9th Earl Spencer, sat down with Laura Kuenssberg for a 30-minute interview on the BBC and expanded on a series of controversial allegations set out in his new memoir, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister”.

‘Gaslit by the King’

Perhaps the most shocking claim in the book relates to a comment allegedly made by King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, in 1997 in the days immediately after his wife Diana’s death.

During a heated telephone call discussing the funeral arrangements, and specifically whether Prince William and Prince Harry, then aged 15 and 12, should walk in the procession, Spencer claims that Charles “hissed” the words “we’ll forget her soon enough”. The earl told Kuenssberg “I’m telling the truth” and described the alleged comment as “monstrous”.

He also alleges that Charles sounded “giddily elated” on the phone shortly after receiving news that Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris. Spencer speculated that this was because the King would now be free to marry Camilla. When Kuenssberg asked him whether he could be certain this was what Charles was thinking, he responded: “I cannot be sure, I’m saying that’s what I assume from his tone was a possibility.”

Buckingham Palace issued a statement on behalf of the King suggesting that “fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”.

The response was “astonishingly provocative and below the belt”, the earl told The Mail on Sunday. “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King,” he said, calling the statement a “rather poor imitation” of the late Queen’s “‘recollections may vary’ quote”.

‘Cancerous’ tabloids

Beyond the headline-grabbing claims, Spencer’s memoir also reveals details of a deeply unhappy marriage. Diana allegedly told a friend in the days before their wedding in 1981 that Charles had told her he was “very happy to marry her” but that he was “not actually in love with her” and she was sure his “heart was elsewhere”.

Spencer also alleges that Charles contributed to Diana’s eating disorder by squeezing her waist soon after their engagement and saying, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” As her doubts grew, the earl claims she went to their father to ask to break off the engagement but he refused, believing it would embarrass the royal family. After the marriage went ahead, Diana allegedly drove to Beachy Head on several occasions “while contemplating ending it all”.

According to Spencer, Diana was also “dreadfully hurt” by the “petty and vindictive” removal of her HRH title following her divorce from Charles. On the day of her funeral, the Queen allegedly offered to restore the title posthumously, but her brother declined the offer, saying it was a “consolation prize”. He says he told Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, “what’s the point, Robert? Now? I mean – Diana’s dead.”

He also claims there was a “lack of obvious care” for 12-year-old Harry, who seemed “so very alone in his despair and torment” following his mother’s death, and suggests the prince was “allowed to spin out of control”. When asked by Kuenssberg how he feels about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex now, he expressed concerns over their security and the “cancerous influence” that tabloid newspaper articles can have. “It would really be beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example.”

Anita Brookner was in her early 50s when she began writing fiction. She was a respected art critic, and unmarried. Anthony Blunt, her boss and mentor at the Courtauld Institute (where she was a lecturer), had just been exposed as a Soviet spy. “Reeling”, depressed and lonely, she found herself writing what would become “A Start in Life” (1981), said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian. It established a “process” that she stuck to religiously over the next two decades.

“Each novel took only three months from start to finish. She’d roam London forming sentences in her head, then simply write them down, at speed.” The novels sold well, and her fourth, “Hotel du Lac”, won the 1984 Booker Prize. But there was also much carping from male critics about how they were all about “sad spinsters” pining for love. (Private Eye called it “Hotel du Lac of Interest”.) Ten years on from Brookner’s death, aged 87, Hermione Lee has written an “astute and tireless” biography bringing this “intriguing, contradictory” figure to life.

Brookner was extraordinarily private, and did her best, as she put it, to “leave no trace”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. She destroyed all her private papers. With “heroic” scholarly devotion, Lee pieces her life together from the scraps of evidence that remain: her alienating upbringing, an only child in a large extended family of Polish-Jewish émigrés in south London; a few “intoxicating years” in post-war Paris; an unwanted return to London to care for her “increasingly demanding, ailing mother”. Lee scours Brookner’s “few appointment diaries” for liaisons with possible lovers – such as the art historian Michael Jaffé and the publisher Christopher MacLehose. And while the “narrative suffers in the second half”, with “dutiful summaries of Brookner’s 25 novels”, overall it displays the “rigour and authority” that made Lee’s previous lives – of Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard, among others – so “indispensable”.

This is indeed a “tremendous” biography, full of striking details about Brookner’s quirks, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. (She often lied about her age, was a “slavish” fan of Philip Roth, and “never missed” “The Archers” or “The Bill”.) Lee describes her appearance brilliantly: “When she was young, she looked old and, when old, she became ageless.”

Lee’s portrait of this “recalcitrant” subject is “gripping and illuminating”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times. “One likes to think that, while she might not have fully approved, Brookner would nevertheless admire the result.”

The modern history of civilization provides ample, almost endless, inspiration for writers, who can draw on both well-known and obscure events to build dazzling narratives. From classic works to recent and more structurally daring standouts, historical fiction remains one of writing’s most popular forms.

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens (1859)

Some classic works of literature from centuries ago were themselves works of historical fiction, perhaps none more beloved than Charles Dickens’ sprawling saga “A Tale of Two Cities.” Set against the backdrop of events prior to, during and after the French Revolution, it’s the story of Lucie Manette and her two suitors, the wealthy Frenchman Charles Darnay and the melancholy English lawyer Sydney Carton, who bear a physical resemblance to one another that serves the plot machinations at key moments. “Epic in historical scale, it is also an intimate book, showing how the personal and political intermingle and what the causes and effects of violence are,” said Anita Sethi at The Guardian.

‘Cities of Salt’ by Abdelrahman Munif (1984)

Abdelrahman Munif’s haunting novel traces the rapid transformation of an unnamed Gulf country into a petrostate starting in the 1930s. Set in an oasis called Wadi Al-Uyoun, its historical arc begins with the arrival of American surveyors and concludes with the transformation of Harran from a sleepy fishing port to a kind of Dubai, casting a critical eye on corruption and the ways that Gulf societies were warped by such a sudden change. This “timely and intelligent novel” brilliantly “captures the confusion and, in the end, the sadness wrought by sudden change, by greed and by two peoples who understand too little of each other,” said David Lamb at the Los Angeles Times.

‘Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness in The West’ by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

The Kid is an illiterate 14-year-old runaway with a “taste for mindless violence” who gets swept up in the gruesome rampage of the Glanton gang, led by the hairless, philosophizing sociopath Judge Holden. “The Judge” dispenses wisdom like “moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak” as he commits unspeakable crimes.

The gang hunts members of the Apache tribe and sells their scalps at the behest of the Mexican government, and Cormac McCarthy’s unrelenting novel follows its members around Mexico and the American Southwest during the 1840s. This “extraordinary poetic novel” serves as an “exploration, at times explicitly philosophical, of the relationship between culture and violence,” said Andrew Hislop at the Times Literary Supplement.

‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry (1985)

Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is regarded as one of the finest novels of the American frontier. Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow Call are former rangers living in the titular border town in Texas when a former colleague, Jake Spoon, convinces them to pick up and move to the Montana Territory. Driving a herd of stolen cattle, the novel depicts their often violent and brutal journey from the Mexican border to Montana less as a heroic embodiment of the American spirit and more as a slow-moving tragedy. A “crushingly brutal” book, in McMurtry’s world “there’s also love and humor and heroism” in the air “despite the copious death,” said Nate Rogers at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” is the kind of sensation that pushed through the boundaries between literature and pop culture. The book is a fictionalized account of the erratic and emotional Henry VIII’s history-altering divorce and then marriage to Anne Boleyn, told through the eyes of the king’s adviser Thomas Cromwell.

The book follows this story for the critical eight years between 1527 and 1535, which led to the enduring schism that created the Church of England. An “expansive novel that unfolds in bits of gossip and dreamlike flashback,” this revisionist portrait of Thomas Cromwell “could forever alter him in the popular imagination,” said Macy Halford at The New Yorker.

‘The Luminaries’ by Eleanor Catton (2013)

Eleanor Catton’s “The Luminaries” burst onto the literary scene by making her the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction at the age of 28. Set in 1866 New Zealand, it follows Walter Moody, a gold prospector who meets twelve local notables convening in his hotel to discuss a series of strange events, from disappearances and murders to a cache of stolen gold, that have engulfed the town.

The events are recounted from each of the locals’ perspectives and at 832 pages, it remains the longest Booker Prize winner. It’s a novel that is “trying both to revive plot as a literary mode and to consider what a storyline looks like in our real, unplotted life, in which things reveal themselves to have a shape only in retrospect,” said B.D. McClay at The New Yorker.

‘The Underground Railroad’ by Colson Whitehead (2016)

Colson Whitehead blends both science fiction and history with “Underground Railroad,” which imagines the slavery-era patchwork of safe houses and escape routes as a literal underground railroad. Cora, the granddaughter of a woman kidnapped from West Africa and sold into slavery, flees her captor’s plantation, plunging her into the book’s alternate steampunk reality where she is pursued by the merciless slave catcher Ridgeway. It is “essential reading, forcing us to examine the chasms that we have willingly created and maintained in our attempts to wrestle with the gravity of atrocity and turn away from our own roles in mythologizing its content and consequences,” said The Book Habit.

‘Great Circle’ by Maggie Shipstead (2021)

Maggie Shipstead sets her novel in two timelines. In one, we follow the exploits of an aviator named Marian Graves, from her impoverished Montana childhood to her improbable career as a fearless pilot, which culminates in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The second follows Hadley Baxter, a troubled actress who has signed on to star in a biopic of Graves after her journal from the grand flight is found.

Shipstead’s electrifying novel spans decades and brings the period of early aviation to thrilling life, in the process touching on themes of women’s empowerment and struggle. A novel that “starts high and maintains altitude,” it “grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary,” said Lynn Steger Strong at The New York Times.

‘Matrix’ by Lauren Groff (2021)

The best historical fiction gives readers a visceral sense of what it might have been like to be alive at different points in history, something Lauren Groff excels at with “Matrix.” In Groff’s imagining, the real figure of Marie de France is a gangly teenager exiled by her lover, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to oversee a dreary English abbey sometime during the 12th century.

Marie painstakingly builds the abbey into a regional power center to which notables must pay their respects. Loosely based on real-life figures and events, “Matrix” is a “highly distinctive novel of great vigor and boldness” that plunges readers into everything from “mystical visions that may or may not be divine, to the earthy business of abbey pigs, diseases and account books,” said Alexandra Harris at The Guardian.

It’s been over two decades since a “brown furry beast with purple prickles all over his back” made children’s book author Julia Donaldson a “household name”, said Laura Harding in The Independent. Now, she is back with a third instalment in her “witty and smart” Gruffalo series. “Gruffalo Granny” sees the Gruffalo and his daughter venture into the “deep dark wood” to source and prepare a special meal for grandma. Donaldson’s prose is as “pleasing as it ever was” and her long-time collaborator Axel Scheffler turns in some “incomparable” illustrations. “It was worth the wait.”

Donaldson is no one-beast wonder, though; she has written plenty of other enchanting children’s books. Here are our top picks.

Stick Man

This tale about a stick who is torn away from his family and must make an “Odyssean journey” home is “just about as epic as picture books get”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. At one point, he approaches “what seems like certain death” – an “impressive” moment “in any story” but “doubly so” in a book for toddlers.

The Snail and the Whale

It’s “impossible” to separate Donaldson’s rhyming text about a tiny snail who hitches a ride on the tail of a whale from Scheffler’s incredible pictures, said Heritage in The Guardian. “Quite frankly, the whole thing reads like a love letter between them.” It’s one of their “very best” collaborations.

The Highway Rat

A “greedy rat” rides along the highway, terrorising other animals and stealing their food in this “swaggeringly illustrated” book, said Marianne Levy in The i Paper. “Nuts, milk, clover – nothing is safe from his dastardly paws”. That is, until he crosses paths with a “devious duck who lures him into an echoing trap”. Donaldson herself has said this gallopingly rhythmic tale is one of her favourites.

The Paper Dolls

No Scheffler artwork on this one but Rebecca Cobb’s “gentle illustrations” are the perfect accompaniment for this “exquisitely subtle” story, said Levy in The i Paper. A chain of paper dolls “dance through the house and garden, singing”, until a boy “snips them into confetti”. He thinks they’re “gone for ever” but he’s wrong: the dolls “have flown into the little girl’s memory”, where they dance on. “Are you crying yet?”

The Gruffalo

Our list would, of course, not be complete without mentioning “The Gruffalo”. Published in 1999, it quickly became a “publishing phenomenon”, said Sophie Knight in Closer. The “simplicity” of the tale about a “clever mouse escaping the clutches” of other animals by inventing a terrifying monster, combined with Scheffler’s “wonderful” pictures, have kept it a “firm family favourite” ever since.

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

British historian Dan Jones is the author of The New York Times nonfiction best sellers The Plantagenets and Powers and Thrones, and the new book Castles (published by Head of Zeus). Lion Hearts, the third novel in his Essex Dogs trilogy, a thriller series set in 14th-century France and England, is now in paperback.

‘American Tabloid’ by James Ellroy (1995)

Often described as a crime writer, Ellroy is to my mind one of the greatest living writers of historical fiction. American Tabloid is part of his Underworld USA Trilogy, alongside The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover, and it’s a grotesque vision of the events surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s biting, fevered, slangy, and ugly. Buy it here.

‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

Tolstoy’s epic about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars is one of the greatest studies of human psyche and society ever written. Tolstoy saw everything and had the grandeur of vision to be able to render it in one totally absorbing novel. Buy it here.

‘Life Photographers’ edited by John Loengard (1998)

While working with the artist Marina Amaral on three books about the history of photography, this was my bible. The great Life magazine photographers—Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Capa, and all—were pioneering, fearless, and often weird. John Loengard’s oral interviews tell their story. Buy it here.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871)

Eliot was the English Tolstoy, with a vicious sting in her tail. I listened to this on audiobook, and its one-liners are so savage that I would have to pull the car over to write them down. Eliot blows Dickens and Austen out of the park. This is a majestic and hilarious book. Buy it here.

‘A Handful of Dust’ by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

When my daughter was assigned this novel in school, I read it so that the two of us could discuss it on long drives. Whoa, baby! Waugh on his turn from satirical humorist to dark inquisitor of the human condition is in full effect here. Is the morality fable at the end an allegory of purgatory or hell? My daughter and I are still debating that. Buy it here.

‘On Boxing’ by Joyce Carol Oates (1987)

I wrote a sports column for the London Evening Standard for a decade and it gave me great respect for anyone who can write well about that over-examined subject. Oates is up there as perhaps the greatest boxing writer who ever leveled her gaze at the square circle. Buy it here.

‘The Life of M’ by Rachel Cusk

“I have disappointing news,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Rachel Cusk’s 11th novel, which has widely been rumored to be a dirt-dishing character assassination of a particular A-lister she’s been friendly with, “isn’t really about Natalie Portman at all.” Granted, the book concerns an actress, identified only as M, whose screen credits, including a breakthrough performance at 13, track with Portman’s. But the novel makes its intentions clear in its opening lines, when the narrator reports having confessed an interest in writing M’s autobiography and M asking if the story would be entirely made up. Cusk, who’s celebrated for forays into autofiction that interrogate the novel as a form, is plainly about to construct “a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.”

“Like most of Cusk’s recent work, Life of M is mainly plotless,” said Emma Alpern in NYMag.com. We see little that happens in M’s life beyond her moving through her days unable to muster any strong feelings or connect to reality as most people experience it. Meanwhile, the narrator neither recedes nor reveals any substantial personal information. Though “there’s a mesmerizing, out-of-time quality to the whole scenario,” Cusk arguably goes too far here in her bid to dismantle fiction’s presumptions, because “her insistence on vagueness can be tedious.” The result is “Cusk’s weakest novel yet,” said Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker. “Life of M is not a disciplined dismantling; it’s a machine breaking down at random.” Cusk wants to make the point that individual experiences don’t matter anymore because we all succumb to a form of groupthink, then reveals her towering self-regard by endowing every one of her characters with the same “humorless, cosmopolitan, self-important” voice that’s undoubtedly her own.

“Life of M is a strange book,” said Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic. “But in its final pages, it performs an astonishing rug pull that makes you wonder whether the book actually has been an autobiography all along, interested in exposing not M but the knotty and unpalatable process of Cusk’s art.” Throughout her career, Cusk has drawn fire, and even been sued, for creating unflattering portraits of recognizable people she has known. Her narrator here admits late in the book that she imagined her way into M’s mind to entertain herself. “To be a writer in this way is to be parasitic—to latch onto someone real and to try to draw out their life force to make art. It isn’t exactly defensible, but for Cusk to expose that practice is deeply fascinating.”

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

“You don’t have to be particularly interested in ancient literature to enjoy this book,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “By the time you finish it,” though, “you probably will be.” In this collection of “wonderfully spirited” essays about great works of the past, Emily Wilson, a classicist best known for her 2017 translation of The Odyssey, is up-front about how every translation contains an element of betrayal. Each word or phrase chosen requires a departure from the original, and attempts at literal exactness generate stiff language. Wilson believes it’s important to capture the feel of a text—its sound, pacing, and even humor. As she weaves together close readings of classic texts with arguments about the larger issues at stake in those texts, “Wilson’s excitement for her subject is irrepressibly moving.”

When Wilson finds fault with a translator, she’s “tough-minded,” even “scathing,” said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. She calls out poet Robert Browning for indecipherable translations and American classics popularizer Edith Hamilton for racism, and she decries all classicists who snobbishly try to bar entry to their domain. “Gatekeeping isn’t Wilson’s style,” and she’s eager to end her field’s use of Latin and Greek to keep out the plebs. She also loves to point out how much overlap exists between the ancient world and our own, finding parallels that link Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and Aristophanes with the likes of Spike Lee and Erica Jong. And she slams Silicon Valley’s tech lords for embracing a version of stoicism that misses the essentials.

Though Wilson went viral earlier this summer with a biting critique she published about the hit screen adaptation of The Odyssey, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe, she champions nuanced critical writing. In this book, said Harvey Freedenberg in Shelf Awareness, the role of critic affords her a chance to unspool “a stimulating tour of Greek and Roman literature.” An essay on Sappho explores female sexuality; elsewhere, we learn about Roman humor and slavery in the ancient world. “Anyone who’s been exposed to Wilson’s work will learn much from these essays.” They’ll also “hope her journey as a trusted guide through this distant world continues.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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