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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Intelligent Investor’ by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig

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

‘The Psychology of Money’ by Morgan Housel

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

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

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

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

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

Pasta, then and now

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

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

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

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

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

Bags of opportunity

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

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

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

The best newly published holiday reads.

All In by Claire Powell

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

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli

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

Transcription by Ben Lerner

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

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

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

Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler

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

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

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

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

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

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

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

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

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

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

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

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

‘The Years’ by Annie Ernaux (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hold Still’ by Sally Mann (2015)

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

‘Flush’ by Virginia Woolf (1933)

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

‘Villa Coco’ by Andrew Sean Greer

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

‘Rasputin Swims the Potomac’ by Ben Fountain

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

‘Dolly All the Time’ by Annabel Monaghan

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

‘The Children’ by Melissa Albert

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

‘Pool House’ by Mary H.K. Choi

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

‘The Shampoo Effect’ by Jenny Jackson

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

‘The end of reading is here’

Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic

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

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

Marcos Cruz at The Hill

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

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

Alexander Abnos at The Guardian

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

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

Galip Dalay at Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dominion’ by Jean Kwok

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

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

‘Cool Machine’ by Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

‘Fishbone Cinderella’ by Elizabeth Lim

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

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

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

1873 by Liaquat Ahamed

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

Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

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

Suing the Kremlin by Martin Sixsmith

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

Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs by Lloyd Blankfein

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

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

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

Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman

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

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

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

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

Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly

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

I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder

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

Upward Bound by Woody Brown

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

Discipline by Larissa Pham

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

This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

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

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

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

This, My Second Life by Patrick Charnley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Virginia Woolf’ by Hermione Lee (1996)

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

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

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

‘The Brontës’ by Juliet Barker (1994)

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

‘Margaret Fuller’ by Megan Marshall (2013)

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

‘Super-Infinite’ by Katherine Rundell (2022)

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

‘Jane Austen’ by Claire Tomalin (1997)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘On Writing’ by Stephen King (2000)

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

‘My Ántonia’ by Willa Cather (1918)

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

‘To the Linksland’ by Michael Bamberger (1992)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Nada’ by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Vanishing’ by Tim Krabbé (1984)

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

‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871–72)

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

‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

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

‘Just Like Heaven’ by Julia Quinn (2011)

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

‘Beach Read’ by Emily Henry (2020)

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

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

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

‘Why We Love’ by Helen Fisher (2004)

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

‘Love 2.0’ by Barbara Fredrickson (2013)

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

‘Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography’ by Joshua Kendall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A prayer to pulverization

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

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

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

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

In the beginning, there was bread

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

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

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

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

Invisible Women

Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019

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

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

Charlie Mackesy, 2019

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

The Chimp Paradox

Steve Peters, 2012

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

Circe

Madeline Miller, 2018

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

Milk and Honey

Rupi Kaur, 2014

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

Dancing with Elephants

Jarem Sawatsky, 2017

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

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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.”