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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Nada’ by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Vanishing’ by Tim Krabbé (1984)

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

‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871–72)

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

‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

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

‘Just Like Heaven’ by Julia Quinn (2011)

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

‘Beach Read’ by Emily Henry (2020)

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

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

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

‘Why We Love’ by Helen Fisher (2004)

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

‘Love 2.0’ by Barbara Fredrickson (2013)

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

‘Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography’ by Joshua Kendall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A prayer to pulverization

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

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

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

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

In the beginning, there was bread

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

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

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

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

Invisible Women

Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019

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

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

Charlie Mackesy, 2019

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

The Chimp Paradox

Steve Peters, 2012

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

Circe

Madeline Miller, 2018

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

Milk and Honey

Rupi Kaur, 2014

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

Dancing with Elephants

Jarem Sawatsky, 2017

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

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With I Hear a New World, Alan Moore continues his five-novel Long London fantasy series, which spans the second half of the 20th century. Below, the author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell recommends six books that have influenced his work.

‘Pariah Genius’ by Iain Sinclair (2024)

A favorite book that looms in the same territory as I Hear a New World, Pariah Genius is a fiction conjured from the life and death of Soho photographer John Deakin. It unfolds in a glistening underworld peopled by Deakin’s subjects and associates—Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon—and delineated with the diamond focus of Sinclair’s consciousness-expanding prose. Buy it here.

‘Mother London’ by Michael Moorcock (1988)

An essential London novel, infused with a deep love of place. We view the war-wounded city through the eyes of memorable characters connected by those airraid shelter nights. Buy it here.

‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’ by Angela Carter (1972)

Carter is another favorite London author, and although her later work includes tremendous novels that are situated in the capital, it’s in earlier books like this, with their unrestrained exoticism, their delirious sensuality, and their steaming orchid forest writing, that I find the new flavor of fantasy my current offerings are aiming for. Buy it here.

‘Gormenghast’ by Mervyn Peake (1950)

I first read Peake’s Gormenghast books at 14, and although bowled over by them, I’d not realized until I was reading my grandsons the trilogy just how much Peake’s berserk use of language, with its lyric seizures, has affected my own style. So, yes, I’m blaming him for my excesses. Buy it here.

‘One Last, Mad Embrace’ by Jack Trevor Story (1970)

Along with all the horror, history, and phantasmagoria of the Long London series, I wanted it to be grotesquely amusing, and my benchmark for wretchedly funny English literary comedy has always been Jack Trevor Story, who, in works like One Last, Mad Embrace, perfectly illustrates Ian Dury’s admonition that “a sense of humor is required amongst the bacon-rind.” Buy it here.

‘I Got References’ by Gerald Kersh (1939)

An honorary Londoner, the awesome Gerald Kersh deserves acknowledgment as an influence, for his shrewd grasp of how the city works, for his pitch perfect evocation of its aura, and, in I Got References, for introducing me to the astounding Ras Prince Monolulu. Buy it here.

‘An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln’ by Lois Romano

“No first lady has been more demonized than Mary Todd Lincoln,” said Amy S. Greenberg in The New York Times. Even before her husband’s 1865 assassination, the former Lexington, Ky., socialite was portrayed as unhinged and unworthy of both the White House and Abraham Lincoln’s love. With An Inconvenient Widow, former Washington Post reporter Lois Romano seeks to rehabilitate Mary Todd’s reputation—“an ambitious project,” given that there’s “a kernel of reality” even in the over-the-top depiction of the first lady in the Broadway comedy smash Oh, Mary! She was erratic, vain, and, even during a deeply depleting war, a compulsive spendthrift. Though Romano at times goes too far in defense of her subject, she’s right that the demonization of Mary has been wildly disproportionate. “Whatever her faults, and they were many, she deserved better, and Romano deserves praise for granting her, at long last, a measure of grace.”

Romano’s ambition here isn’t new, said Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker. “Measured rehabilitation of the first lady’s character has been the dominant mode of Mary Lincoln biography for more than 70 years.” But in the popular imagination, untruths persist that should be corrected. First, she was not a traitor. Born in 1818 into a slaveholding family, Mary evolved into a committed abolitionist and an im­placable Unionist who poured time into caring for wounded Union soldiers. Earlier, because she was well-educated and witty, she sometimes impressed reporters covering the 1860 presidential campaign even more than her husband did. But opinion turned against her when she began lavishly redecorating the White House, and the death of a second young son, in 1862, didn’t win her lasting sympathy. Her reputation was buried when Abraham’s former law partner, William Herndon, began spreading lies about her shortly after the assassination.

Though Herndon would object, Romano “offers a persuasive portrait of a loving, mutually supportive marriage,” said Melanie Kirkpatrick in The Wall Street Journal. The author also “emphasizes the impact of grief on Mary’s mental health.” Three of Mary’s four sons died by 18, and in the wake of her husband’s death, she struggled not just emotionally but also financially, having to fight for years for a congressional pension. Meanwhile, her politically ambitious surviving son, Robert, was so embarrassed by the negative press she attracted that he had her committed to a mental institution, a decision she had to fight to reverse. She died of a stroke in 1882, and while she “won’t go down in history as one of the most congenial first ladies,” Romano’s “exemplary” examination of her life may ensure she’ll be remembered for both her flaws and her merits.

‘Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by Guy Cuthbertson

“Obscenity lacks staying power,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. Some 65 years after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was widely derided as a book that might hasten the collapse of Western civilization, even pornographers aren’t bothering to invoke Lady Chatterley’s name or riff on the extramarital romps she engaged in with her paraplegic husband’s brooding, sweaty gamekeeper. But the book’s history is worth revisiting, because for decades, “it set polite society on edge,” even triggering landmark obscenity trials in Japan, India, the U.K., and the U.S. more than a generation after it was first published. Though “the most corrupted among us have long abandoned Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a totem of smut,” D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel lives on as a cultural milestone.

“There was always a great deal of hypocrisy amid the furor surrounding the book,” said Tim Bouverie in Air Mail. From the moment Lawrence had the first edition privately printed in Italy, American and British authorities confiscated copies that had been smuggled across their borders and secretly read the novel for pleasure. Even editions in which the sex scenes and four-letter words had been expurgated sold well in the 1930s. Cuthbertson “consistently informs and amuses” as he surveys the jokes and parodies the novel inspired, and he’s “fascinating” on various readers’ political interpretations of the tale. The 1960 trial in London that unleashed the unexpurgated paperback edition was “one of the great comic episodes in British cultural history,” and Cuthbertson’s account adds fresh color.

Readers of the novel today might be less offended by the sex than by Lady Chatterley’s antisemitism and her lover’s homophobia, said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. But Cuthbertson doesn’t dwell on that ugliness or Kate Millet’s famous attack, in 1970’s Sexual Politics, on the phallocentrism of Lady Chatterley’s sexual awakening. Lawrence himself thought of his final book, completed two years before his death at 44, as a serious novel about the sacred nature of sex. Others justifiably found humor in the way he conveyed that idea. So credit Cuthbertson for keeping his story light. “After all the moralizing that went with the book, it’s the right way to go.”

“No literary genre divides opinion quite like self-help,” said Josiah Gogarty in GQ. Some people love it, while others steer well clear. But the best personal growth books “cover a lot more ground than you might think”, spanning everything from deeply personal memoirs about grief to science-backed guides that could change your relationships. Here are our top picks.

Secure by Dr Amir Levine

It’s been 16 years since Dr Amir Levine and Rachel Heller published the bestselling “Attached”, which set out the “four main styles of bonding” in human relationships: anxious, secure, avoidant and fearful avoidant, said psychotherapist Philippa Perry in The Guardian. Now Levine is back with his keenly anticipated follow-up that’s also rooted in attachment theory. The psychiatrist lays out a “set of tools to help us feel more secure in all our relationships” – not just with romantic partners, but with friends, parents and “even with ourselves”. Firmly grounded in neuroscience and research, it’s an insightful read that can help you “know yourself better” and move towards “positive change”. Of course, you can’t just read the book: you must also be willing to “do the work and then keep up the practice”.

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

This is “different from any other self-help book I’ve ever read”, said consultant psychiatrist Alex Curmi in The Guardian. Written in the format of a “philosopher talking to a young, frustrated student”, Kishimi and Koga introduce readers to Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s ideas around the “separation of tasks, where you decide which tasks you are responsible for and then let other people get on with their own tasks”. This can be “extremely liberating” – especially for people pleasers.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Published over a decade ago, this insightful book is one that “hasn’t wavered in popularity” and continues to “attract new fans with each passing year”, said Daisy Jones in Vogue. “It’s easy to see why.” The Dutch psychiatrist writes in a “persuasive” way that “rings true”. Backing his ideas with scientific research, he argues that “though the brain may work hard to suppress trauma, the body does not in fact forget”.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

“If you’ve ever wanted to change something about your life but found it overwhelming”, this transformative book provides a “step-by-step” guide to building small positive habits, said Tria Wen in Reader’s Digest. This is a “great book to gift”, helping readers “think about their goals in terms of little shifts they can make” that can be divided into “more manageable pieces”. By adding “one tiny” habit at a time, it’s possible to “create real and lasting change”.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Joan Didion is known for her “journalistic dispatches written in ice-cold prose”, said Gogarty in GQ. But following the sudden death of her husband in 2003, she “turned her unblinking analytical eye on her own life” in this powerful memoir. In it, she shines a light on her “debilitating grief”, transforming the nature of writing about bereavement. “Mourning is part of being human, and ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ has lessons for everyone.”

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

The title of this book might sound “terrifying” (4,000 weeks is the average human lifespan) but beneath the cover there’s an “optimistic” message, said Gogarty in GQ. Instead of trying to encourage “unattainable levels of productivity”, Burkeman “urges you to accept your limits and make peace with your perpetual mountain of tasks”. His advice? To “stop sweating over your to-do list” and choose to focus only on what’s important.

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It is not too early to start picking out your summer reading list because a slew of new releases promise to keep June interesting. Standouts for the perfect summer beach read include a highly anticipated debut of a speculative fiction rising star and several historical-fiction options.

‘Land’ by Maggie O’Farrell

The bestselling author of “Hamnet” and “The Marriage Portrait” returns with a novel about Ireland in the 1860s, during the years before and after the Great Hunger. “Land” follows a man named Tomás and his son Liam as they work on the Ordnance Survey, a project to map the whole of Ireland for the British Crown.

Through its characters, the book “stages an argument about the virtues of various types of maps—those that are measured, those that are recollected, those that are dreamed,” said The New Yorker. In her latest work, “the facts ground the fiction, the fiction enlivens the facts,” and both “work together to suggest that the pursuit of resurrecting the past and the pursuit of telling a good story can, in some cases, be one and the same.” (June 2, $32, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘A Resistance History of the United States’ by Tad Stoermer

Historian Tad Stoermer reframes American history by revisiting past resistance movements, such as the Salem Witch Trials and the Underground Railroad. Through these examples, Stoermer “dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history — exposing the curated nostalgia, moral evasions and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power,” said the publisher. (June 2, $20, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Sublimation’ by Isabel J. Kim

Isabel J. Kim has made a name for herself in the genre of speculative fiction. The winner of the Nebula, Locus and Shirley Jackson prizes for her short stories is publishing her debut novel about immigration and doppelgangers this summer.

Across “Sublimation,” immigration is explored through a science-fiction lens in a world where emigrating creates a second “instance” of the person who stays behind in their home country. The story follows Soyoung Rose Kang, a Korean immigrant in America, who comes face to face with her clone when she returns to South Korea for a funeral. Kim’s “pulls in historical, cultural and literary examples of ‘instancing’” before “recasting them all in the brilliant light of her imagination,” said The New York Times. (June 2, $29, Macmillan, Amazon)

‘Daughters of the Sun and Moon’ by Lisa See

Best-selling author Lisa See returns with another historical fiction novel that illuminates a dark era of American history. The story focuses on the real-life “Night of Horrors” massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys in post-Civil War Los Angeles in 1871.

The novel is told through the shifting narration of three Chinese women whose friendship helps them survive the chaotic time. See offers a “stunning piece of historical fiction based in truth,” said Library Journal. Her book will “touch readers with the characters’ resilience, heroism and devoted friendship.” (June 9, $29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay’s near-future, genre-blending sci-fi horror novel explores timely themes of AI, reality and memory. Julia Flang, a semi-professional gamer, was tasked with chaperoning a man in a vegetative state, who happens to have proprietary AI implanted in his head. What follows is a humorous, surreal and terrifying journey across the country. For fans, it will not “come as a surprise that Tremblay ends it all on a nicely gory note,” said Kirkus Reviews. A “smart and smart-alecky tale of technology put to bad ends by bad people.” (June 30, $30, HarperCollins, Amazon)

The line between gamer culture and traditional storytelling is being blurred, one quest notification at a time, as readers get addicted to novels that combine sci-fi and fantasy narratives with features from video games.

These “gamified novels”, which are based on video games, are “going mainstream” and selling in their millions, said The Economist.

Cosmic octopus 

Standing for “literary role-playing game”, LitRPG is a genre of fiction that combines a traditional story with mechanics from role-playing games and video games. Although a Russian publisher insists that it coined the term in 2013, versions of the genre had been popular in Asia since the turn of the century.

The books “borrow the tropes of video and tabletop games”, and the characters “face challenges and grow stronger” as they “go on quests to obtain rewards”.

For instance, in the novels of Matt Dinniman, whose books have sold over six million copies, the hero “gets tougher as he punches goblins” and “defeats a monster” that is a mix of a “cosmic octopus” and “your average, suburban, anti-vax, let-me-talk-to-your-manager mom”.

The reader is regularly “updated on his character stats, health bar, XP [experience points] and special skills”. “Video-game vernacular” offers a “useful shorthand” – “minor figures” in the story are called “NPCs: non-playable characters”.

“Unlike choose-your-own-adventure tales”, readers don’t “make narrative choices”, but they “often interact with their favourite authors and leave comments on chapters, which then shape the stories”. This means the authors are “thinking strategically on and off the page” and many “self-publish their work online, chapter by chapter”. Some writers are particularly “prolific, posting new material daily”.

Foot-shaped sex toys

The adulation of readers is quite something. Dinniman “knew things were getting out of hand” when “rabid” fans “started asking him to sign their feet”, said The New York Times last year. When he put out a statement drawing the line at signing feet, his “undeterred” fans brought “foot-shaped silicone sex toys”, “heart-patterned boxers, pink Crocs, ‘Gilmore Girls’ DVDs, stuffed cats and severed doll heads” – all objects that feature in his novels.

The money is impressive, too. His series is in development for television and is being adapted into graphic novels, a multi-cast audio drama and a tabletop game. Dinniman has a merchandise range that includes sweatshirts, baseball caps, phone cases, wall tapestries, action figures and plush toys.

“Quantity has been trouncing quality,” said The Economist, so the genre is “not going to win any prestigious awards”, but readers “looking for escapist thrills are often forgiving”. Although the core readers are “gamers in their 30s”, its “biggest audience” is audiophiles, ranging from “truckers to stay-at-home mothers”, because the novels “often have only one perspective, and are usually narrated in the first person”, making them “easy to follow”.

Many of the readers “grew up gaming or playing tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons”, said USA Today. Brandon Dwane, a 28-year-old from Massachusetts, “never considered himself a reader”, but “that changed” when he began reading LitRPG. Now, he’s a “junkie” for the “dopamine” hits the novels give him.

Lena Dunham “crashed into public consciousness” in 2012 when the first season of her comedy-drama “Girls” – often described as the millennial “Sex and the City” – aired on HBO/Sky Atlantic, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. The show “made her very, very famous” – the kind of fame which involved her face appearing on “building-sized billboards” – and “that in turn made her very, very hated”.

Dunham was attacked for many things – for embodying white privilege, for having the wrong body shape – and that “barracking” profoundly damaged her mental and physical health.

In this “melancholic” memoir, Dunham documents a seemingly unending range of afflictions. These include colitis, endometriosis, opioid addiction, “constant gynaecological issues”, OCD and PTSD, said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian. At one point, she “accidentally sets herself on fire”; there’s also a horrifying incident involving cotton buds. Dunham isn’t always an easy person to feel sorry for – her decisions are “questionable”, and her name-dropping is shameless – but she writes honestly and fluently, and has a rare ability to discuss the “painful parts of life in a way that feels both intimate and universal”.

Weaving together the “funny, the heartbreaking and the grotesque”, this book (Dunham’s second memoir after 2014’s “Not That Kind of Girl”) “confirms her talents as a writer of prose as well as scripts”, said Hannah Williams in the Financial Times.

The strongest chapters are those that focus on “Girls”, which “time has cemented” as one of the most notable shows of the past two decades. Later on, the book becomes “a little bloated” and repetitive. “But in its portrayal of the ecstasy, heartbreak and sheer thrill of what it is to be young and lost, ‘Famesick‘ reaffirms Dunham’s status as a generational voice.”

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Manil Suri’s new memoir, A Room in Bombay, describes his coming of age in a single room that he shared with his parents before his move to the U.S. at age 20. Below, the author of the award-winning novel The Death of Vishnu recommends six books set in Indian cities.

‘The Heart is a Shifting Sea’ by Elizabeth Flock (2018)

With surprisingly candid reportage, Flock tracks the lives of three middle-class couples as they navigate life in a newly globalized Mumbai. Each couple finds that the notion of love, so romanticized in Bollywood movies, must be forged into something more practical if they are to survive the city’s myriad challenges. Buy it here.

‘Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal’ by Sandip Roy (2026)

A fascinating account of Chapal Bhaduri, one of the last iconic female impersonators in Kolkata. In a series of interviews, Chapal takes us from memories of his mother through the rise and fall of his career. A must for understanding how attitudes toward gender and sexuality have evolved in India’s larger cities. Buy it here.

‘The Sari Shop’ by Rupa Bajwa (2004)

Bajwa transports you into the heart of Amritsar, with its glitzy bazaars, dusty slums, and plush mansions. The story she weaves, about the widening gap between India’s classes, is ultimately devastating. Sadly, such stories still play out repeatedly in every corner of the country. Buy it here.

‘Ghachar Ghochar’ by Vivek Shanbhag (2017)

India has deep literary traditions in several regional languages, and this delicious novella, translated from Kannada, is a perfect amuse-bouche. The narrator’s family has moved to an affluent part of Bengaluru, and their attempts to head off meddling outsiders are at times subtle, at times pugnacious, but always hilarious. Buy it here.

‘Land Where I Flee’ by Prajwal Parajuly (2013)

Amma’s grandkids travel to remote and hilly Gangtok (a city “infested with stairs”) to celebrate her 84th birthday. Everyone has an acid tongue and brims with spiteful resentment. The resulting snark-fest makes this one of the funniest Indian novels I’ve ever read. Buy it here.

‘The Painter of Signs’ by R.K. Narayan (1976)

This classic work by one of the founding fathers of Indian fiction is set, like most of his novels, in the unhurried fictional town of Malgudi. Narayan’s bittersweet love story about a hapless painter’s crush on an emotionally distant social worker has lost none of its humor, relevance, or unconventionality. Buy it here.

‘This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History’ by Beverly Gage

“In one obvious respect, This Land Is Your Land is perfectly timed,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Our country’s looming semiquincentennial inspired historian Beverly Gage to embark on the “companionable” national tour she chronicles here. In 2023 and 2024, the Pulitzer Prize– winning author visited roughly 300 historical sites associated with particular events, choosing to focus on just 13, which she presents in chronological order. Because Gage avoids venerating or condemning her countrymen for past deeds, “what comes through is how complicated and just plain weird a lot of American history is.” The sites she visits are “often marked by contradiction,” which Gage “highlights to powerful effect.” And while her accounts of past events are never divisive, “as a historian, she knows that none of the attempts to fulfill the Declaration’s promise of freedom and equality has ever come easily.”

To anyone expecting an old-fashioned American road trip, with all the minor misadventures such journeys entail, “you’ll be disappointed,” said Ceci Browning in The Times (U.K.). As a guide to the story of the nation as told by its historic sites, though, “it’s pretty great.” Gage begins her tour in Philadelphia at the Museum of the American Revolution, which, she notices, lavishes more attention on George Washington’s tent than the thousands of soldiers he camped alongside. At Washington’s Mount Vernon home, barely a mention is made in the main tour of the people he enslaved. Gage admires the National Women’s Hall of Fame, in Seneca Falls, N.Y., but points out that it’s housed not in a majestic building but in a former sock factory. Does she end up making sense of the American story? “She certainly shows that ‘sense’ of any kind is getting harder and harder to come by” as the sites of many important events either venerate or condemn, simplifying history to make it easier for tourists to absorb.

Though Gage is “an accomplished historian and capable writer,” said Charles Lane in The Wall Street Journal, her “warts-and-all look at the American past dwells, a bit predictably, on the warts.” When the time comes to cover World War II, for example, she takes readers to the remnants of a Japanese internment camp and the atomic bomb testing site in Los Alamos, N.M. “If Gage wanted some celebratory leaven,” she’d have had plenty of options, including, say, the many sites in Dayton, Ohio, devoted to the Wright Brothers. But credit Gage for finding a fresh way to tell a history of the U.S., said Edmund Fawcett in the Financial Times. And while she does her best to stay hopeful, it’s clearly a struggle, given the dour mood of the nation amid its 250th year.

‘Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health’ by Roxanne Khamsi

“People tend to assume that the genes we inherit from our parents are a fixed blueprint for our growth and development,” said Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker. But medical researchers are increasingly interested in the ways our DNA is forever changing, and in Beyond Inheritance, science journalist Roxanne Khamsi “provides a useful guide to this body of research and its far-reaching implications.” Advances in DNA sequencing have revealed that of the 30 trillion cells in the human body, about 4 million are replaced every second, requiring 4 million copies of a code that’s many billions of letters long. Eventually, errors slip in, errors that accumulate. These can be harmful, producing cancer, while some have real benefits.

Still, Khamsi’s “disquieting” book vividly reveals the battle that our cells are forever waging against one another, said David A. Shaywitz in The Wall Street Journal. Cancers begin with a single mutant cell whose offspring compete for dominance while acquiring additional mutations that can render them resistant to medication. As even healthy-seeming people age, they accumulate mutant blood cells that have a growth advantage over healthy cells. This makes many seniors far more susceptible to blood cancers, heart attacks, and strokes. Mutant cells in the aging brain, meanwhile, appear to contribute to cognitive decline. At times, Khamsi “seems almost apologetic for the dismal message she carries,” but, from birth, a process is unfolding within us that will kill us if nothing else does sooner.

“It isn’t all bad news,” said Michael Le Page in New Scientist. Khamsi’s “most astonishing chapter” describes how mutations sometimes correct inherited conditions, including the rare immunological disorder associated with babies who must live in protective bubbles. Still, “helpful mutations are the exception rather than the rule,” and there’s apparently no escaping the damaging ones. Khamsi “doesn’t go on to draw what seems the obvious conclusion: that the only way to dramatically extend lifespans is to redesign the human genome to massively reduce the mutation rate.” While the resulting new beings may look like us, however, they’ll “no longer be human.”

A controversy surrounding a prize-winning short story has raised questions over the use of artificial intelligence in fiction.

“The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir was named the winner in the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Prize, but “syntactical tics” alleged to be telltale signs of AI use, as well as “the verdict of an AI detection platform”, have caused an uproar in the literary world, said The Guardian.

Smelling a rat

The judging committee said the winning story was told in “a voice of restraint and quiet authority”, praising Nazir’s language as “sublime” and “precise yet richly evocative”. But soon “literary sleuths smelled a rat,” said LitHub.

“Off a hunch”, Ethan Mollick, a professor who studies AI, ran the story through Pangram, a program that claims to detect AI writing with 99% accuracy; the results came back with “100% red flags”. Writing on Bluesky, Mollick said: “Come on, if you know you know.”

Nazir has denied using AI to write the story, which he says was inspired by childhood memories. Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they were still investigating the allegations. The foundation that awarded the prize said that all entrants were required to confirm that their submission was their own work and not created with AI assistance.

The accusation is “another episode” in an “ongoing, frenetic conversation” about “whether artists and creators are passing off AI-generated work as their own” and whether publishers “will be able to reliably catch them doing it”, said The Guardian.

In April, Hachette pulled a novel called “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard from bookshops after Pangram said it was 78% AI-generated, and in March, The New York Times cut ties with a freelance journalist after he admitted to having used artificial intelligence to write a book review. Such episodes have “fuelled discourse around the telltale signs of AI writing”, including frequent use of specific words (“delve” being one example), a “profusion of em dashes” and a predilection for “vague, soft intensifiers” such as “quietly powerful” and “deeply transformative”.

Detection industry

The “ideal” expressed by Razmi Farook, director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, who said she places “complete trust in writers”, may not “be enough to stem the tide of AI slop” in “everything from high literature to scientific research”, said Wired.

Some writers have already admitted that they use AI. Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged that his new book “The Future of Truth”, which “grapples with the nature of veracity in the AI age”, itself contains AI-hallucinated quotes. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk “outraged her own fans” by admitting that use of LLMs is “part of her creative process”.

But the “biggest bummer is to come”, said LitHub, because although “winning a literary prize is one small step” for AI, it’s “sure to be catnip for the pushers touting the technology’s creative potential”.

Meanwhile, the row over the Commonwealth Prize and similar controversies have “generated energetic business” for a “new cottage industry” of AI detectors, said The Guardian. Researchers into the efficacy of the models predict that there will be “a continuous technical arms race” between the detectors, AI models and writers adapting their usage of them.

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Philosopher Slavoj Zizek is the author of more than 50 books, including Liberal Fascisms, a new essay collection that explores authoritarianism packaged as freemarket capitalism. He credits the novels below with presenting catastrophe in ways that changed his thinking.

‘The Drowned World’ by J.G. Ballard (1962)

Ballard depicts a postapocalyptic future in which global warming has rendered much of the planet uninhabitable. In a flooded London, several characters take advantage of societal collapse to fulfill unconscious urges. The idea that a mega catastrophe could create an opportunity to experience jouissance—surrender to bliss—profoundly influenced me. Buy it here.

‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Liu Cixin (2008)

In Liu’s masterpiece, Earth is confronted with a planet whose unpredictable suns cause severe temperature shifts. I see it as Earth in the near future: Are we facing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”? Buy it here.

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

This is arguably the most depressing novel I’ve ever read, presenting a society in which human clones are created solely to produce a supply of healthy organs, a practice that requires a major shift in public morals. Is this not our situation today? We cope with new threats by reshaping our ethical principles. Buy it here.

‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ by Jacqueline Harpman (1995)

Perhaps even darker is this novel about a girl and 39 women held prisoner in a bunker. When the male guards flee, the captives emerge into a barren plain, and the girl, the last to survive, writes about her life. Existentially, I feel like the girl: Even in a crowd, I am totally alone. My words will probably never reach their addressee, someone who will read them properly. Buy it here.

‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

Socialist realism at its most noble and convincing. In the near future, a global heat wave that begins in India kills millions and spreads around the world. But humans decide on cooperation and gradually cope with the threat. Buy it here.

‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

An apocalyptic novel with a sort of happy ending. After an epidemic devastates humanity, one group, the Traveling Symphony, connects disparate survivors by performing Shakespeare. I accept that in our catastrophic predicament we need more than art to survive. Buy it here.

‘The Things We Never Say’ by Elizabeth Strout

“The Things We Never Say is classic Elizabeth Strout,” said Adam Begley in The Atlantic. There’s the usual New England setting, some family secrets, and an unhappy marriage. There are a few differences, though. We’re not in Maine, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s usual locale, but in coastal Massachusetts, where we’re following a protagonist very unlike Strout’s most famous creation, the brittle, blunt Olive Kittredge. Artie Dam is a 57-year-old married high-school history teacher who is widely beloved by his students. Still, Artie, “suffers from the most common ailment in Strout’s world: loneliness.” When we meet him, he’s even contemplating suicide. However, it’s not a mortal threat that carries the story; it’s Strout’s usual magic—“harpooning the reader with language as plain as a Congregational church and a cast of characters no more exotic than your neighbors.”

“Strout’s capacious empathy and rigorous attention to the nuances of human behavior and psychology are as evident as ever,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. A decade after a fatal tragedy that Artie had no part in but has believably infected his relationships with his wife and son, Artie feels his isolation growing when his friend Flossie, one of the only people he feels he can confide in, reveals she’s moving away. Unfortunately, “this is by far Strout’s bleakest book,” and it isn’t helped by also being her most political, as she has tied Artie’s despair in part to the imminent 2024 re-election of President Trump. Her story “seems to lose its bearings” because she tries to make it a parable for where America is headed. You can agree that Trump is ruining the country and still not want to hear the 2024 or 2025 details repeated here, said Maggie Shipstead in The New York Times. “On the other hand, there’s a poignancy to the way Strout sets Artie’s personal disillusionment against the backdrop of a larger grief.”

Despite the novel’s accretion of tragedies new or remembered, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter, “the story keeps ascending toward a sense of astonishment at the interior complexity of life.” Artie eventually expresses amazement at the hidden layers of every person he knows, including himself. Yet he remains a relative innocent for a man his age, unable to accept the griminess of the world as it is outside his classroom. Strout has said she loves him, and while “such affection would typically be deadly for a serious novel,” hers is “the love of a Protestant God who spares us no agony on the path to beatitude.” At the end of his journey, he finds no simple answers. Still, the universe “feels a little more comprehensible with a novel this good in it.”

‘Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay’ by Mary Lisa Gavenas

“Mary Kay Ash could move product, regardless of what the product was,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. Long before 1963, when she founded the successful cosmetics company that bears her name, the Texas native established herself as a champion in-person seller of ointments, mitten dusters, and a wide range of other products. Ash wanted housewives everywhere to chase autonomy with similar tenacity, and by the time she died at 83 in 2001, hundreds of thousands of Mary Kay “consultants” were signed up to sell the company’s beauty items from Houston to Beijing. Author Mary Lisa Gavenas acknowledges in her new biography of Ash that most such salespeople fail, but she brushes worry aside, proving “more concerned with Mary Kay’s singular place in the peddler pantheon.”

Nothing in Ash’s family background predicted the success she achieved, said Barbara Spindel in The Wall Street Journal. At age 10, she was already running a household because her father was an invalid and her mother needed to work. A mother of two herself by 19, Ash remained ambitious enough that she was quick to sign on with Stanley Home Products shortly after the direct-sales outfit opened its sales force to women. Over the subsequent two decades, doors remained closed to her, but she absorbed enough capitalist scripture to go solo at 45, eventually becoming the first female CEO of a company listed by the New York Stock Exchange. In Gavenas’ “enthralling” account of the growth years, the blond-wigged, aphorism-spouting Ash turns out to be “a vivid presence.”

There are three stories told here, said Mimi Swartz in Texas Monthly. Besides Ash’s biography, readers get a history of the limits put on women’s financial independence and the evolution of in-home sales parties into the multilevel marketing model Mary Kay still employs today. But while Gavenas “has a gift for storytelling,” her book says too little about how that model operates as a kind of pyramid scheme in which early participants reap rewards for recruiting other sales representatives while the latecomers often lose money and hope. Though it’s not Ash’s fault that men still outearn women, “maybe she didn’t do as much as legend would have it to rectify the situation.”

The journalist and host of BBC Radio 2’s lunchtime slot picks books ranging from murder mysteries to poetry anthologies. His second crime novel, “Turn the Dial for Death”, has just been published.

A Murder Is Announced

Agatha Christie, 1950

Don’t start with Christie’s best (“And Then There Were None”) or the most genre-bending (“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”) or the ones that became multiple movies (“Death on the Nile”, “Murder on the Orient Express”). Start with a regular whodunnit that has a fabulous set-up: the murder is announced in a small ad before it happens.

The Last Enemy

Richard Hillary, 1942

I think this is the greatest book I have ever read. Written by a Spitfire pilot who flew and died heroically, it even contains instructions on how to bring down a Messerschmitt in a dogfight. I begged Penguin to let me read it on Audible, and they said yes.

The Good Daughter

Kumi Taguchi, 2025

Kumi Taguchi is an Australian TV reporter with whom I exchanged some messages on Twitter before it descended into the sewer that is X. Then, by happy coincidence, we met and she helped me with a Tokyo holiday. Now she has brought out an incredibly moving book about embracing her heritage, despite a painful relationship with her late Japanese father.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

John le Carré, 1963

When I was a little boy, I saw this book cover everywhere and the title hypnotised me. Children take everything literally: “From the cold? Why would a spy not be able to wear a coat, Mummy?” Now I see it for what it is – one of the greatest debuts in history, and the gateway to 25 million books sold by the remarkable le Carré.

The Rattle Bag

Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, 1982

If you have only one poetry book, make it this one. If you read only one poem in it, make it “The Dream About Our Master, William Shakespeare” by Hyam Plutzik. Haunting.

For those who lived through it, the era of the Black Death must have been a “living nightmare”, said Katherine Harvey in The Times. During its first wave, between 1347 and 1353, the disease typically halved the populations of the areas it affected – killing at least 100 million people in Europe, Asia and North Africa. “Subsequent outbreaks, which occurred every few years until the 18th century, took millions more lives.”

In this “learned but horribly compelling” study, the British historian Thomas Asbridge offers a “global narrative” of the plague, from rural Ireland to the cities of Italy and Egypt. Punctuating Asbridge’s account are many “examples of horrendous personal tragedy”: a Sienese shoemaker who wrote of burying his five children “with my own hands”; a Carthusian monk who “watched 34 of his brethren die”, burying each in turn, “until he was alone with his dog”.

Written with great sensitivity to the “considerable psychological burden that unimaginable loss and the constant threat of new outbreaks placed on survivors”, “The Black Death” is a “powerful portrait of a world that stared death in the face”.

Most English-language histories of the medieval plague – a bacterial disease usually transmitted by fleas that had bitten infected rats – have been focused on western Europe, said Tony Barber in the Financial Times. Asbridge is “more ambitious”: he shows that the “Black Death was probably more devastating in cities such as Cairo and Damascus” – largely because orthodox Islam, which ruled that the plague was not contagious, prohibited flight from infected areas.

The most enjoyable sections of this book focus on those who “did well out of the pandemic”, said The Economist. “In Cairo, gravediggers raised their fees. There was a boom in religious art in Italy, because so many plague victims left money for paintings in their wills.” And in England, because so many clergymen died, laypeople – including, on occasions, “even” women – were allowed to hear final confessions.

The Black Death had a “long tail of consequences”, said Steven Poole in The Guardian. It probably encouraged Jewish migration eastwards – because Jews in western Europe, blamed for its spread, were massacred in their thousands. It produced labour shortages that “contributed to the end of serfdom”, and Asbridge claims it may “even have inspired the Protestant revolution”, by focusing minds on the “imminency of death”.

A work of impressive scholarship that evokes the “terror and pity” of this bleak period, “The Black Death” is a “magisterial survey”.

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Ayelet Waldman is the author of the best-selling memoir Bad Mother and of the novels Daughter’s Keeper and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. In A Perfect Hand, her novel to be published on May 19, a lady’s maid in 19th-century England falls for a valet. Below, Waldman shares her six favorite books about missed opportunities and remorse.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

Persuasion is my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels, though we have been informed sternly by no less a luminary than Nabokov that Mansfield Park is the “greatest,” whatever that means. Though Anne Elliot could be accused of being retiring and easily manipulated, there is an element of steel in her character that I love. Also, the book is about longing and regret, and in looking at this list I see that these are emotions I seem obsessed with. Buy it here.

‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan (2001)

This is also a book about regret, and about shame. It is, like Persuasion, about the need to rewrite history, to expiate one’s mistakes. Buy it here.

‘Old Filth’ by Jane Gardam (2004)

Here’s another favorite, also permeated by regret! The hero (such as he is) looks back on a painful childhood and a life characterized in no small part by disappointment. Though he is a successful barrister and judge, Sir Edward Feathers’ nickname, derived from “Failed In London Try Hong Kong,” sums up his life: This book, though melancholic, is leavened by Gardam’s mordant wit. Buy it here.

‘Shakespeare’s Kitchen’ by Lore Segal (2007)

I’ve seen Shakespeare’s Kitchen described as an academic send-up, a comedy of manners, and it is, but Segal’s collection of interlocked stories is also a book about loneliness, told with subtle (and not so subtle) humor. Buy it here.

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason (2020)

I would not have picked up Sorrow and Bliss but for the recommendation of author Ann Patchett. It is one of the funniest and one of the saddest books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about the way we defeat ourselves in love, and about the exhaustion of dealing with mental illness, something I can relate to all too well. Buy it here.

‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

How could a list of books about missed chances and self-defeat be complete without The Remains of the Day? Every time I reread this novel, I find myself in a frustrated (yet delighted) fury about how Stevens was so determined to sabotage any chance of happiness that he couldn’t even allow himself to imagine a future with Miss Kenton. Buy it here.

‘The Rolling Stones: The Biography’ by Bob Spitz

“Hundreds of books have been written about the Rolling Stones, but few sparkle quite like Bob Spitz’s,” said Marc Ballon in the Los Angeles Times. The author, who has previously written doorstop accounts of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, tells the band’s story in full. We get the boys’ early days as a blues cover band, creative highs such as Exile on Main St., valleys such as 1986’s Dirty Work, the drug problems, the breakups, the makeups, and the disastrous 1969 concert at Altamont. Though Spitz “unearths little new information, he excels at presenting the Stones in glorious Technicolor” because he “homes in on telling details that give the band’s story a deep richness and poignancy.” The result is a “magisterial” work worthy of its 700 pages. “For anyone who loves or even likes the Stones, it’s indispensable.”

The tale begins with “one of the great origin stories, ranking up there with Steve Jobs inviting Steve Wozniak over to play with computers,” said David Kirby in The Wall Street Journal. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the loosest of acquaintances when they ran into each other as 17-year-olds in 1961, Richards struck by Jagger’s armful of records. Thus was born one of rock’s most dynamic duos, soon to be joined by Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Ian Stewart, the last a piano player pushed off the band’s official roster because of his looks. Most would make it through several decades together, though Jones was dismissed from the band he co-founded shortly before his 1969 death, to be replaced by Mick Taylor, then Ronnie Wood. Revisiting their collective story with Spitz’s guidance is like seeing a familiar portrait anew. “The faces are the same, but the light is different, and suddenly you see shadows you never noticed, a new determination in one person’s eyes.”

“There’s a certain swagger in Spitz’s subtitling his chronicle of the band ‘The Biography,’” said Leah Greenblatt in The New York Times. But the author is a credible biographer of record, his takes on the music are “both forensic and poetic,” and “many small revelations and corrections emerge along the way.” His account is “diligent to a fault” as he strings together albums, addictions, court battles, and relationship dramas, and after devoting 600 pages to the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, he “suddenly leapfrogs over several decades in the final chapter, as if he just realized that his car is double-parked.” But he’s wise enough to position the Jagger-Richards partnership as the story’s central platonic love and enduring source of tension. And his epilogue, which finds the surviving Stones crushing yet another 2024 tour stop, “feels appropriately celebratory and bittersweet, like an Irish wake without the body.”

‘Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare’ by Katrina Manson

“Unpacking global policies on the use of AI by militaries—the potential benefits, pitfalls, and murky ethics—will fill books for decades to come,” said Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist. Katrina Manson’s new book does something simpler. It relates the fascinating story of the development of the Pentagon’s main AI initiative, Project Maven, launched in 2017 to take the work of consolidating and analyzing military intelligence data away from slow, mistake-prone humans and assign the work to AI. But backers of the project always intended to go further by having the AI program choose targets—as it does now—and eventually take them out autonomously. AI weapons need to be managed closely. Manson’s chilling story “suggests the reality is otherwise.”

At the center of the veteran reporter’s account stands Maven’s founder, Drew Cukor, said Fred Kaplan in The New York Times. Realizing in 2017 that AI would spread to the battlefield, the Marine intelligence officer vowed to help get the U.S. up to speed with China, which was off to a head start. After Google pulled out of the project when employees protested doing military work, Cukor turned to then-obscure Palantir to get Project Maven off the ground. But he knew that reducing the role of human decision-making in the so-called kill chain would spook Pentagon officials, so while courting them, he kept that part a secret, waiting until Maven proved its value. By 2022, it was being used by Ukraine to hold back Russia. A year later, Israel used it in its attacks on Gaza.

“Manson clearly comes to like Cukor, or at least begrudgingly admire him,” said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker. Maven’s catalyst wanted to reduce the number of war casualties that are caused by errors, which makes it “at least intermittently possible” to root for him as he battles hide-bound bureaucrats and agencies resistant to sharing data with nominal compatriots. But Cukor insists he trusted that Maven would never do more than assist human decision-making, and “Manson repeatedly points out that this was always somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate obfuscation.” Today, machine-driven carnage isn’t coming; it’s here.

Most standard-size cookbooks showcase between 100 and 150 recipes. In 2008, the author and cooking teacher Raghavan Iyer said “pshaw” and published his magnum opus, “660 Curries.”

“To us Indians, a curry is a sauce-based dish,” said Iyer, meaning “curry” as employed in Western instances like all-purpose “curry powder” is a term so general as to lose all significance. Curry instead is both the alpha and the omega. It’s both a saucy dish across the subcontinent and a hyper-regional way of preparing said saucy dishes.

Name your cooking weapon

Pick a base, and you are nearly guaranteed at least one recipe for it in “660 Curries.” More often, you will be bombarded with an array of options.

Consider the legume. Yellow split peas, horse gram, chickpeas, brown lentils and moth beans — Iyer assembles an armada of more than 15 different types of legumes for the Legume Curries chapter. The hits are present, including a faultless recipe for the restaurant icon, dal makhani, with its whole black lentils opulent with Punjabi garam masala, yogurt and heavy cream.

A behemoth is forever going to do the absolute most, so lesser-known regional specialties are everywhere across the book. Toovar dal (split yellow pigeon peas) is softened in a bath of unripe green mango, green bell pepper and coconut milk in a dish from the southwestern state of Kerala. Stressing the omnipresent influence of the Portuguese colonizers, chorizo cooks with red kidney beans and black-eyed peas in a spunky chile-vinegar tomato sauce in a Goan adaptation of Brazilian feijoada. Here and in the book’s other chapters on vegetables, seafood, poultry and eggs, meat, and paneer, curry is no catch-all. It slips, shifts and adapts.

To the curry-sphere and beyond

Iyer cheated a touch with the book’s title because some chapters exist outside of the sauce world. The opening chapter, Spice Blends and Paste, provides a constellation of building blocks and endless masalas with seven types of garam masala alone.

The final chapter, Curry Cohorts, dabbles in a touch of everything: rice preparations, including a Maharashtrian-style fried rice with peanuts and curry leaves; all manner of breads, such as poori, roti and naan; and even a mango cheesecake and saffron-licked green tea. “660 Curries” is an imposing endeavor. And, oh, how the book’s recipes work.

Iyer died, too young, at 61 in 2023. He was an admired teacher and an indefatigable researcher. And almost 20 years later, “660 Curries” remains as essential as it was when it first appeared. Scratch that. “660 Curries” is all the more pertinent now. The world needed time to embrace its sweeping, detailed grandeur.

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The vernal atmosphere of May is encouraging us all to gather newness around us and refresh our lives for the spring season. This month, readers have plenty of new books to choose from, including a touching immigration story, the memoir of a major voice in critical race theory and a psychedelic mystery set in South America.

‘Abundance’ by Hafeez Lakhani

Grief takes center stage in this debut about an Indian American family facing a medical crisis. Sakeena, the matriarch, is forced to consider all the choices that brought her from India to the panhandle, where she co-owned a Florida Dunkin franchise with her husband.

When the treatment plan for her illness clashes with her religious beliefs, her family must reckon with how to support her wishes. The novel is an “epic, multigenerational family story, imbued with a strong sense of place and philosophically specific characters,” said Literary Hub. (out now, $28, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Backtalker: An American Memoir’ by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

The mother of intersectionality and one of the foundational scholars of contemporary critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, tells the story of how she got there by “starting to talk back,” said Literary Hub. The memoir “Backtalker” charts Crenshaw’s “extraordinary journey from precocious child to renowned public intellectual,” said The New York Times.

She coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to “urge us to consider the ways that bigotries rooted in gender, race and class overlap.” In addition to her scholarship on civil rights, race and feminist theory, Crenshaw is a law professor at both Columbia and UCLA. (out now, $30, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun’ by Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda’s “psychedelic novel” follows a pair of friends who travel to a “drug-soaked and pleasure-seeking techno-shamanistic festival in Ecuador, held at the foot of an active volcano,” said Literary Hub. While one friend fully indulges in the event, the other remains wary of the ominous energy that naggingly haunts her. It’s a novel of “friendship amid hidden pasts, uncertain futures and the supernatural from an exciting young writer.” (May 12, $20, Coffee House Press, Amazon)

‘On Witness and Respair’ by Jesmyn Ward

The two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward presents a decade’s worth of her nonfiction, including reflections on Black literary giants and personal essays on the death of her husband and on raising her son in a fractured America. Ward’s work is “bearing witness to injustice,” said Kirkus Reviews. In her writing, she aims to “assert my own humanity and the humanity of those I love,” Ward says in the book. (May 19, $29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘How to See Like a Machine: Art in the Age of AI’ by Trevor Paglen

Artist Trevor Paglen, in his “incisive” new book, “distills key insights” from his work to “make the case that mainstream understanding of images remains stuck in an outdated paradigm,” said Art News. He examines the origins of the current media landscape, in which images evolve in response to viewer feedback. His ideas “carve a clean, linear path through our messy neural era,” engaging in the “kind of big-picture sensemaking that books remain well-suited to do, even as AI encroaches on this terrain.” (May 19, $20, Verso Books, Amazon)

It’s the morning of 29 June 2029. Whitehall is packed and there’s a huge police presence. Outside 10 Downing Street, the outgoing Labour PM gives a short speech; and not long afterwards, to thunderous applause and equally loud boos, his successor, Nigel Farage, takes his place behind the same lectern. “Is this your dream or your nightmare?” asked Lucy Denyer in The Telegraph. Either way, it’s a plausible scenario.

Reform UK currently has the most members of any party, the support of many of Britain’s most generous political donors, and a consistent lead in the polls. In this “by turns entertaining and downright terrifying” book, the journalist Peter Chappell offers a “speculative account” of what might happen if Farage were to come to power.

Chappell doesn’t “mask his dislike of Reform”, and the future he envisages – marked by rioting, parliamentary chaos and a full-blown constitutional crisis – is “definitely a worst-case scenario”. But nor do his predictions seem wholly far-fetched, as they’re based on a careful analysis of “what Farage and Reform have promised should they be elected”.

Chappell’s “semi-fictional Farage” wastes no time in withdrawing from the various human rights and refugee conventions, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. That clears the path for mass deportations and sending Navy gunboats into the Channel to turn back small boats. He then goes to war with the BBC, falls out with J.D. Vance (who by now has replaced Donald Trump as US president) and comes close to starting a war in the Falklands. “Events unfold at a zippy pace”, and within just two years Farage is desperately clinging onto power. “My only worry is that Chappell may be too optimistic about the speed with which things fall apart.”

There’s much that is convincing in his account, particularly when it comes to how the protagonists behave, said Ethan Croft in The Times. “On his first day in Downing Street, Farage lights up the first cigarette smoked in No. 10 in decades.” Dominic Cummings returns to Downing Street, then “flounces out again”. Robert Jenrick gets demoted when he’s “caught plotting to replace Farage”.

But the book’s lack of partiality is a weakness: in Chappell’s “premonition, there is no scenario in which Reform succeeds on its own terms”, achieving a new political settlement, as in 1945 or 1979. Nor does he “extend his predictive powers” to what happens if Reform fails. “Don’t assume it will be a sudden return to the soothing centrist balms of the established parties. There could be something much worse waiting.”

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Actress Jamie Lynn Sigler, who played Meadow on The Sopranos, co-hosts the popular podcast MeSsy with Christina Applegate. In her new memoir, And So It Is..., Sigler opens up about her disastrous first marriage, her eating disorder, and living with MS. Below, Sigler shares six books that help ground her.

‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho (1988)

If I had to pick one book, this would be it. It quietly rearranged how I move through the world. It taught me that purpose isn’t something you chase at the expense of your life; it’s something revealed through paying attention to your life. Buy it here.

‘War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield (2002)

This is the book I return to when I can feel myself slipping into hesitation, distraction, or self-doubt. It tells us that showing up consistently, imperfectly, is the work. It reframed creativity from something precious and intimidating into something sturdy, almost blue-collar. You don’t wait for the muse—you just clock in. Buy it here.

‘The Untethered Soul’ by Michael A. Singer (2007)

This one really changed my life when I learned how to step back from the voice in my head and realize that I am not my thoughts. It gave me a sense of internal space I didn’t know was possible—that peace isn’t something you earn but rather something you just stop interrupting. It changes how you relate to anxiety, fear, even joy—less resisting, more allowing. Buy it here.

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankl (1946)

This is one of those rare books that doesn’t just change how you think; it changes what you believe you can endure. It strips life down to the (in my opinion) most essential life question: not “Why is this happening to me” but “What is being asked of me now?” Buy it here.

‘The Four Agreements’ by Don Miguel Ruiz (1997)

I have a mini version of this book in my purse at all times as a reminder. It’s deceptively simple, but it hits hard. The “agreements” aren’t just nice ideas—they’re practices that quietly remove so much unnecessary suffering from your life. It’s like a mental detox. Buy it here.

‘Inside Out’ by Demi Moore (2019)

As I prepared to write my memoir, I began to read others, searching for a tone that felt gripping, and raw and relatable. This was just that. It isn’t just a celebrity memoir; it’s a brutally honest excavation of identity, self-worth, and the cost of trying to be who you think you are supposed to be. She is admirably unguarded about the patterns that shaped her. Buy it here.

‘The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark’ by Craig Fehrman

“Do we really need another book about the Lewis and Clark expedition?” asked Andrea Wulf in The New York Times. The answer, after reading Craig Fehrman’s new page-turner, is “an emphatic yes.” One reason for its novelty is that, in revisiting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s westward trek into the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, Fehrman has shifted focus away from the famous pair, widening the scope to include other members of the so-called Corps of Discovery as well as several Native Americans the 33 men met en route. The result is “a richly woven tapestry of voices” that “reframes this well-known story, revealing it as more complex, and profoundly human.” Because certain members portrayed didn’t leave expansive journals, Fehrman sometimes has to rely on conjecture or push his imaginative reconstruction too far. But that’s a minor complaint. Fehrman’s multifaceted account is “a fantastic achievement.”

More than 220 years on, “the Lewis and Clark expedition still intrigues,” said Karin Altenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Tasked by President Thomas Jefferson, who had been long obsessed with exploring the West, Lewis and Clark’s team journeyed from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back, with most of the 8,000-mile journey on the Missouri and Columbia rivers. Some members of the party had joined out of patriotic spirit, some for money, and others, including the kidnapped Shoshone teenager Sacagawea, had no choice. “Lewis and Clark had to make sure this diverse, multilingual crew jelled, all the way to the Pacific and back,” and it’s a testament all parties’ desire for peace that the expedition’s many interactions with Indigenous tribes resulted in only one violent death. “Immensely engaging,” The Vast Enterprise gives a well-known story “fresh breadth.”

“This is vivid, character-based history,” said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe. The chapters rotate between the viewpoints of principal players, among them soldier John Ordway, Lakota and Arikara leaders, Jefferson, and, yes, Lewis and Clark. Fehrman also fleshes out two participants often treated as footnotes. York, an enslaved servant to Clark, was awarded a degree of autonomy during the journey, while Sacagawea, the enslaved wife of interpretor Toussaint Charboneau, is shown to be a valuable collaborator and becomes “a three-dimensional character with her own hopes, dreams, and regrets.” Shuffling between these figures “pays enormous dividends, as Fehrman weaves a tale that uses human stories to go beyond hard facts and calcified myths.” The result is “a ripping good read.”

‘Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir’ by Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips’ evocative new book “rejects the linear chronology of a typical memoir,” said Donna Rifkind in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, its structure “mimics the fracturing of modern American life as she has witnessed it.” Born and raised in West Virginia in an Allegheny Mountain town, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, who is now 73, left Appalachia in early adulthood and has since lived on both coasts and in the Mountain West. But her hometown of Buckhannon “has never loosened its grip,” and as the author of 2023’s Night Watch reflects on her upbringing and nomadic adulthood in the book’s 22 personal essays, she seems to be both blurring the line between dreams and memories and tracing “a slow-motion rupture” in American society.

“Phillips brings to this memoir the kind of resonant details and sharp insights that have enriched her fiction,” said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. Her family helped settle West Virginia; one side of the family fought for the Union, the other for the Confederacy. She brings us inside the local beauty parlor where her schoolteacher mother kept weekly appointments. She writes empathetically about her parents’ separation after she and her brothers left home and movingly about her mother’s final days. Almost by necessity, given her deep local roots, “Phillips’ gaze often extends beyond family,” and in one essay, she details how West Virginia, once cut off from the coast, was gradually sullied by timber barons, then coal companies and, most recently, the fracking industry.

“It is hard to read Small Town Girls without recalling your own childhood,” said Gabrielle Stecher Woodward in the Southern Review of Books. But Phillips hasn’t created a “one-stop antidote to home-sickness.” Instead, “what she does provide is a sense of comfort for those grappling with their own grief,” whether about lost loved ones or bygone times. Her “quietly devastating” passages about witnessing her mother’s final decline are “grounded in Phillips’ refusal to look away from the truths so easily postponed.” Because her sensibility is the only through line we need, Small Town Girls proves to be “a master class in the art of the personal essay.”

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Jimmy McDonough is the author of acclaimed biographies of music greats Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, and Al Green. His new book, Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks, chronicles the shambolic life of a cult country-music legend. Below are his picks for the books that moved him most.

‘Nico’ by James Young (1992)

I preferred the original title for this masterwork, The End, because that’s exactly what it’s about: the threadbare last tours of Nico, the sphinx-like goddess of the underground. She scores drugs, urinates in sinks, and just doesn’t give a damn about anything except (maybe) her music. Grim, hilarious, moving. I can picture Nico getting to the last page and stubbing out a cigarette on the cover. Buy it here.

‘Happy Like Murderers’ by Gordon Burn (1998)

Burn calmly takes you on a submarine ride through the horrors of married serial killers Fred and Rosemary West, and he never comes up for air. Unlike much of the true crime ground out these days, this book does not feel cheap and exploitative. Buy it here.

‘America’s Most Hated Woman’ by Ann Rowe Seaman (2005)

“Exacting” doesn’t do Seaman justice. In this book on the improbable life of superstar atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, she methodically wades through minute details from court records, press accounts, and living witnesses to pin her subject to the wall for all time. Buy it here.

‘Tiny Tim’ by Harry M. Stein (1976)

Much has been written about vaudevillian supernova Tiny Tim, but this wildly entertaining book got inside “the dainty bear” first. An old-school gumshoe reporter with an eye for withering detail, Stein gets Tiny to spill the beans just by hanging around, and he does it with wit and affection. Buy it here.

‘I’d Rather Be the Devil’ by Stephen Calt (1994)

Calt had a love-hate relationship with decrepit blues genius Skip James and most likely himself. It makes for riveting reading. He strips away myths like he’s using paint remover to erase a bad mural, only to find a worse portrait underneath. Provocative. Buy it here.

‘Liberace’ by Darden Asbury Pyron (2000)

Liberace seldom comes up these days unless it’s as a kitschy GIF. This heartfelt work bestows the showman with the dignity he deserves and rightfully tells his story as one of a complex, contrary American hero who managed to break barriers while wearing sequined hot pants and laughing his way to the bank. You will not think of Liberace the same way again. Buy it here.

In the small hours of 29 November 2019, a young man was captured on CCTV jumping from a fifth-floor flat on Millbank on the Thames. His body struck the embankment wall on the way down, and he drowned in the water below. It emerged that he was 19-year-old Zac Brettler, a former public schoolboy from Maida Vale known for telling “tall stories”, said Ian Thomson in The Guardian. That night, he’d been in the apartment with “gangland debt collector” Verinder Sharma, and another associate, a cryptocurrency and real estate trader named Akbar Shamji. There was evidence that the two men, who’d befriended Brettler weeks earlier, had assaulted him shortly before his death – though neither was charged by police, who concluded that the death was probably suicide.

In this “scrupulously researched” and “page-turning” book, The New Yorker magazine journalist Patrick Radden Keefe revisits the case – and reaches a different conclusion. Opening a disturbing window onto Britain’s capital, with its dirty money and “Walter Mitty-like” fantasies of wealth, “London Falling” is a “grimly absorbing” work.

Despite coming from a comfortable background, Brettler always “wanted more”, said Craig Brown in The Times. At his north London private school, he’d rubbed shoulders with the “offspring of dodgy oligarchs”, and envied “the way they would hire Ubers rather than walk a few minutes from dormitory to classroom”. He compensated by spinning fantasies: it emerged that when he’d met Sharma and Shamji, he’d posed as “Zac Ismailov, the son of an oligarch”, and had claimed he was about to come into a £200 million fortune. Radden Keefe suggests that this “bogus boast” is what sealed his fate – that when the pair discovered that he’d conned them, they lured him to the apartment to exact revenge. Brettler jumped, he thinks, in order to escape, believing he’d land directly in the water.

Radden Keefe – best known for “Empire of Pain”, his exposé of the Sackler family’s role in the opioid epidemic – specialises in character-based narratives from which “wider moral themes emerge”, said Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. “London Falling” is at heart a “desperately sad family story”, but Radden Keefe overlays this with a “disturbing glimpse of London’s sinister, money-driven, exploitative underbelly”. There are a few minor slips: no Londoner would think of calling Park Lane “a short street”. Overall, however, this “impeccable” book is a “masterclass of evidence-chasing, narrative clarity and authorial empathy”.

‘Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class’ by Noam Scheiber

“A college-educated working class sounds like an oxymoron,” said George Packer in The Atlantic. But New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber has great hopes for the cohort on which he’s affixed that label: college graduates in their 20s and early 30s who have had to settle for low-paying wage work after earning their degrees. In his new book, Scheiber profiles about a dozen or so young Americans who turned to labor activism following dispiriting experiences with employers including Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, Hollywood studios, and the universities that impoverished them in the first place. While he occasionally questions his subjects’ career decisions, “he’s plainly on their side,” viewing their perception of unfairness as real and their activism as the best way to fight economic inequality. Unfortunately, “he isn’t sufficiently aware of the insularity of their project,” of how unlikely it is that these young progressives will ever be joined by noncollege wage workers in an effective broader movement.

“There’s much truth in Scheiber’s reporting,” said Eric Levitz in Vox. College graduates have become more progressive in their economic views since the 1990s and more likely to identify with rank-and-file workers. But his claim that today’s college grads have been pushed leftward mainly by their collapsing economic fortunes is “a bit misleading.” Yes, tuition and housing costs have soared. But the share of college grads who hold low-wage jobs is smaller than it was three decades ago, and the relative return on a degree in lifetime earnings, despite the impact of the Great Recession and the pandemic, is significantly greater. The stories Scheiber shares are well told, and the precarity of his subjects’ lives “vividly evoked,” said Ruy Teixeira in The Wall Street Journal. But among their generation, they’re “an idiosyncratic subset,” not the norm.

You could also say Scheiber’s heroes were naive to expect better from their employers, said Kenneth S. Baer in Washington Monthly. Often, though, they were misled. Apple used the label “geniuses” for retail-store staffers like Chaya Barrett, but the sweet talk didn’t pay her bills and she soon turned to union organizing. While Mutiny celebrates such activism, Scheiber is “too keen an observer of American political life” to fail to mention that the college-educated working class may be too progressive to mesh easily with the rest of the working class, whose members strongly favored President Trump in 2024. But while Scheiber focuses on workplace issues, Mutiny is “ultimately an education book,” a warning to our colleges and universities that “higher education, as an industry, has become too expensive, too mercenary, and too irrelevant for far too many.”

‘Famesick: A Memoir’ by Lena Dunham

“This may be the first Lena Dunham work built on deep hindsight,” said Madeline Leung Coleman in NYMag.com. The star and creator of Girls shot to fame in her early 20s by appearing to present her own life raw, with all its embarrassments. She did so in her debut film, in her hit HBO series, on Twitter, and in her best-selling 2014 memoir. Now, though, as she nears 40, Dunham is ready to look back on those heady years and connect the dots between her impulse to share, her lightning-rod status, and the onset of chronic illnesses that still plague her. “It’s a Hollywood story written in blood and vomit and pus,” but because she’s a savvy writer, “she knows to foreground the relatable.”

“If you’ve hated Dunham this whole time and resented her success, well, good news,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. “Famesick will tell you just how awful all that success made her feel.” As her star rose, critics blamed her for everything wrong in the world, including the failures of feminism, Millennials, and white people, and Dunham was listening. Worse, as she stretched herself thin during Girls’ six-season run, her body was rebelling, generating racking pain, triggering a Klonopin addiction, and eventually requiring acceptance of living with an incurable connective tissue disorder. Not surprisingly, “it’s a shocking and funny read,” packed with tidbits about fellow celebrities, and a reminder of “what made her so interesting in the first place.”

Dunham’s first memoir was “pert and packaged,” adorned with lists, asterisks, and “cute little pen-and-ink illustrations,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Famesick, to its credit, “dispenses with such pleasantries.” It also names names. Hitmaker Jack Antonoff is painted as an inadequate boyfriend. Adam Driver, Dunham’s onscreen boyfriend, throws a chair during the shooting of a difficult scene. Jenni Konner, Dunham’s co-showrunner, comes across as “a callous taskmistress,” one who ignored Dunham’s calls for medical help. “What a relief,” then, that Dunham, who’s been sober for eight years and is now married to a man she mentions only in the acknowledgments, is “not a true casualty of all the cruelty visited upon her.”

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Clean energy pushes fossil-fuel power into reverse

Renewable energy met all global electricity demand growth in 2025, with solar generation surging by nearly a third. This is the first time that clean energy generation, including solar, wind and water power, has pushed “fossil fuel power into reverse,” said Euronews. Solar generation met 75% of the rise in demand, while wind supplied most of the remaining increase, according to research from the think tank Ember. Renewables now produce 34% of global electricity.

A music fan’s recordings of 10,000 shows go online for free

Aadam Jacobs has been taping live concerts for 40 years, and is now uploading 10,000 recordings to a free online archive. The Aadam Jacobs Collection, hosted by the Internet Archive, features his recordings of major artists at small Chicago venues in the 1980s, including Nirvana and The Cure. He first used a Walkman-style recorder to tape the performances, and then purchased digital recorders. Volunteers are working with Jacobs to organize, digitize and upload the tapes.

Independent bookstores stage a comeback

A total of 422 new independent bookstores opened across the U.S. in 2025, up 31% from 2024, according to data from the American Booksellers Association. That uptick defies “predictions of retail consolidation,” said Gene Marks at The Guardian, and leans into the spirit of “entrepreneurism and independence.” Indie bookshops also offer “resources and spaces for learning, organizing and respite,” providing “third spaces” for people in cities, towns and rural areas, Mark Pearson said at the Los Angeles Times.

First ‘cloud jaguar’ spotted in 10 years in Honduras

A camera trap in Honduras’ Sierra del Merendón mountain range recently captured the first footage of a jaguar there in a decade. The animal is called a “cloud jaguar,” since it was spotted in a mountaintop cloud forest. Local officials and Panthera, a wildcat conservation organization, have been working together to improve conditions in the area for jaguars, taking steps like increasing the number of anti-poaching rangers on patrol and reintroducing iguanas and other prey.

We tend to think of our medieval ancestors as warty, unwashed, riddled with fleas, doomed to die young, and with little or no knowledge of medicine, or the body’s workings, said Helen Carr in The Telegraph. But in this “richly” detailed book, Katherine Harvey seeks to explain what they did, thought and knew – and it turns out that many of their concerns mirrored our own, from digestion and hair loss to mental health. Their medicine was based on the idea that the body was made up of four “humors” – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – connected to air, fire, earth and water. Good health relied on keeping them in balance, by blood-letting for example.

Medieval physicians’ views on diet, said Gerard DeGroot in The Times, were surprisingly similar to ours; they recognised the importance of fresh air and clean water, and they perceived a connection between body and mind. During the plague in Venice in 1348, “restrictions were placed on the wearing of mourning garb because it encouraged sadness, which damaged physical health”.

That said, some of their treatments were pretty weird. A mix of cow dung and wine was thought to cure obesity; male baldness was linked to the body drying out, so baths were prescribed. As for sex, this was believed to be good in moderation – for marital harmony, and as a form of exercise. If both parties orgasmed, all the better as this would help in the excretion of harmful superfluities.

This is a terrific book: I’ve rarely had such fun learning about the past. Ultimately, it leads one to the conclusion that our ancestors were “a lot like us: they fretted about their health, took steps to improve it, and cared for those who suffered. In the process of examining the medieval body, we also get a glimpse at the soul.”

‘London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth’ by Patrick Radden Keefe

“The best true-crime stories use a particular event as a key to unlock a world,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book “does just that,” finding, in the unexplained death of a London teenager, “both a private loss and a parable of the decay of a once great city.” In the early hours of Nov. 29, 2019, Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old from a comfortably middle-class family, leaped from a fifth-floor balcony into the Thames River and drowned after striking the sloping river wall. Though the official inquest failed to determine whether Zac jumped to escape danger or to kill himself, The New Yorker’s Keefe winds up blaming the death on the corruption of London in recent decades by oligarchs, con men, and international criminals. The strands of the story he tells “strongly suggest that it was the city that destroyed the boy.”

Keefe’s book “opens a window onto a world of financial dirty work and Walter Mitty–like fantasies of aspirational wealth,” said Ian Thomson in The Guardian. As a teenager, Zac became wealth-obsessed, but his parents were unaware their son had become a compulsive fabulist who had told entrepreneur Akbar Shamji and Shamji’s violent associate, Verinder Sharma, that he was “Zac Ismailov,” a Russian oligarch’s son soon to receive a hefty inheritance. The pair eventually uncovered Zac’s ruse, and they were the last to see him alive, but they denied causing him to jump from the balcony of Sharma’s apartment. Keefe’s “scrupulously researched” account proves “grimly absorbing from start to finish” as the author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain weaves together the stories of these three men.

With London Falling, Keefe has given us “a morality tale for an amoral age,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. But he appears to have been so invested in providing Zac’s parents’ perspective on the story that his own conclusions can’t be fully trusted. “He shrugs off Zac’s deceptions as a kind of precocious child’s play,” and “despite red flags everywhere,” proves “reluctant to consider the teenager’s fraught mental health,” leaning instead on “a golden-boy-ensnared-by-the-wrongcrowd approach.” For me, Keefe’s close collaboration with Zac’s parents “transforms the narrative from a standard true-crime procedural into a profound exploration of parental grief and the search for accountability in a city that often protects its most shadowy residents,” said Tobias Grey in Air Mail. The police come off as disturbingly negligent, but even the Brettler family takes its knocks, and “Keefe’s probity and knack for telling a compelling story ensure that no stone is left unturned.

‘Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry’ by David Streitfeld

“An unmistakable sadness clings to Western Star,” said Andrew R. Graybill in The Wall Street Journal. Though David Streitfeld’s new biography of Larry McMurtry is also “highly entertaining,” it can’t ignore that Texas’ most famous novelist was also, despite his Hollywood triumphs and enduring friendships, a loner at heart who was defined by his deep ambivalence about his home state. Characteristically, McMurtry wasn’t keen on being the subject of a full biography; Streitfeld, after befriending him, won his cooperation piecemeal. Somehow, the veteran journalist succeeds in “resisting any inclination to hagiography,” creating a memorable portrait of the author of Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and dozens of other novels.

“Streitfeld’s writing is notable for its descriptive energy and reportorial straightforwardness,” said Joyce Sáenz Harris in The Dallas Morning News. After a flash-forward to the 2023 estate sale that followed McMurtry’s 2021 death, Streitfeld lays out his subject’s life nearly chronologically, starting with his 1936 birth in Archer City, the small Texas town that inspired The Last Picture Show. McMurtry’s obsession with books began in childhood, and his ties to Hollywood began when his first novel, published when he was 25, was adapted as Hud, the 1963 Paul Newman classic. Streitfeld also covers the filming of the screen adaptations of Picture Show and the Lonesome Dove series as well as McMurtry’s late-career co-authoring of the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. As the life chapters accrue, “it is hard to imagine anyone could have done a more thorough, honestly reported, yet compassionate job.”

McMurtry loved spinning tales about himself, and though Streitfeld reports the lore, “he fact-checks as he goes,” said Marilyn Bailey in Texas Monthly. McMurtry liked to claim that he grew up in a home bereft of books, but that now looks like a stretch. It’s also doubtful that the home sat on “Idiot Ridge.” McMurtry did die with 228,000 books on his shelves in Archer City. He just didn’t die in Archer City, as obituary scribes were told. As Streitfeld puts it, “If you’re the greatest writer in Texas, there’s no romance to dying in Arizona.”

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

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

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

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

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Near-identical trajectories’

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

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

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

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

Reader ‘sleuthing’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Variations of a common theme

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

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

The personal as point of entry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Judy Blume: A Life’ by Mark Oppenheimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

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

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

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

‘Livonia Chow Mein’ by Abigail Savitch-Lew

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

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

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

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

Star names and free films

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

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

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

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

Kid-friendly events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane’ by Lindy West

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

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

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

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

Cambridge Literary Festival

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

22-26 April, cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

Bath Literature Festival

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

16-24 May, bathfestivals.org.uk

Stratford Literary Festival

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

7-10 May, stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk

Hay Festival

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

21-31 May, hayfestival.com

Bradford Literature Festival

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

3-12 July, bradfordlitfest.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Gaps in logic’

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

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

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

‘The plagiarism machine’

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

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

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

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

‘The Butter Book’

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

‘Down South + East: A Chinese American Cookbook’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Lebanon: Cooking the Foods of My Homeland’

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Taste of Country Cooking’

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

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

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

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

Middlemarch

George Eliot, 1871

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

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan, 1997

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

Waterland

Graham Swift, 1983

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

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Elif Shafak, 2024

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

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco, 1980

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

Wild Swans

Jung Chang, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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