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.

“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”.

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.”

“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

Production of a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Northanger Abbey” has collapsed, leaving crew members owed “potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds”, said Deadline.

The project began as an ambitious reimagining of Austen’s gothic novel but it fell apart before cameras could roll. Some of the “hardest hit” workers have even been “left having to borrow petrol money to return home”, said The Times.

‘Uniquely vulnerable’

“A lack of money is at the root of many of the issues”, as funding “proved catastrophic” for the independent company behind the adaptation of the 19th-century book.

The £7 million production, “mounted in the UK by a team of inexperienced US producers”, got under way in Bath and Bristol but “fell apart during advanced prep” early last year, said Deadline. The company has collapsed and “failed to deliver on its promises to pay workers what they are owed”, so a “handful” of crew are taking legal action.

It’s thought that around 50 freelancers could be owed up to £200,000 after signing contracts with the independent business Northanger Limited. In a leaked recording, David Alan Ruben, the company’s chief who is also credited as the film’s writer, director and producer, said that its investors had failed to provide funding. “It has been the most brutal, horrible experience, and I’m just so sorry,” he told staff in February last year.

The UK has “no rules” around putting crew cash in an escrow account, so freelancers here are “uniquely vulnerable” when films run into financing issues, said Deadline.

Philippa Childs, head of the broadcasting union Bectu, said that “this kind of thing happens all too often” when production companies commission work without “secure funding for the project in place”.

Austen’s ‘most nuanced’ works

Austen is “one of the most adapted authors of all time” with her life and novels dramatised for film and TV from “every angle imaginable”, said Amy Wilcockson, from Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation.

But when it comes to “Northanger Abbey” and “Mansfield Park” filmmakers seem “happy to leave these stories be”. “Northanger Abbey” offers a “harsh criticism of the conventions of marriage, wealth and social status faced by young women”, while “Mansfield Park” shows that Austen was “interested in questions of slavery and race”.

Perhaps this “serious and timely subject matter”, which is “unlike the usual” Austen narrative, “puts off filmmakers”, but they’re her “most nuanced works”, which focus “not just on romance” but on society’s “wider issues”. They “deserve their time in the limelight”.

Bestselling mystery and suspense novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz has published over 50 books for adults and for children, including the Alex Rider teen-spy series, and created the “Foyle’s War” drama series for TV. Here, he picks six of his favourite books. His latest Detective Hawthorne book, “A Deadly Episode”, is out now.

A Kiss Before Dying

Ira Levin, 1953

It’s hard to believe this brilliantly structured story of a psychopathic killer and the three women who are his targets was the debut of a 23-year-old. The killer speaks to you as he cold-bloodedly moves in on his victims. But you don’t know who he is.

The Modesty Blaise series

Peter O’Donnell, 1965-1985

I’ve always loved this series. His female Bond, a crime boss turned superspy, is a terrific creation and her “capers” are endlessly entertaining. It’s sad that Quentin Tarantino, a fan, never got round to making the film. And sadder still that Joseph Losey did – it tanked!

Thérèse Raquin

Émile Zola, 1867

There has never been a more profound exploration of murder and its consequences. It’s a dark novel in which the two lovers are destroyed by guilt, with a tense atmosphere as suppurating as a wound.

The Flashman series

George MacDonald Fraser, 1969-2005

Another lifelong favourite. The adventures of a Victorian rogue, coward and womaniser are so politically incorrect that it may now be illegal to read them. But they’re huge fun and a kaleidoscope of Victorian history.

Bleak House

Charles Dickens, 1852

Dickens has always been my mainstay and this masterpiece – an examination of the horrors of the Court of Chancery seen through the never-ending case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce – includes, among a brilliant array of characters, the first detective in British literature.

Prisoners of the Sun

Hergé, 1949

Tintin was the first character I loved, and this – with its partner, “The Seven Crystal Balls” – is arguably Hergé’s finest work, with a breathtaking climax as Tintin escapes being burned alive. His stories inspire me to this day.

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”.

“Sometimes – rarely – there is a book that I want to read again immediately, the very moment I have reached its last page,” said Andrea Wulf in The New Statesman. “Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel ‘Land’ is such a book.”

Much of it is set on a peninsula on the western coast of Ireland in the 19th century, during and after the Great Famine. Tomás, an Irish mapmaker who works for the English Ordnance Survey, has a mystical experience there while drinking from a once-holy spring in a copse. There is a brief detour into the peninsula’s prehistory and history – druids, ritual sacrifice, the coming of Christianity, English colonisation – before O’Farrell returns to the 19th century and follows the story of Tomás, his wife and children. There is “regret, loss, rebellion, love, family… I love all of O’Farrell’s novels, but I think ‘Land’ might be her finest.” It is “intimate, tender and crushingly devastating. It sings off the page and pierces your heart.”

It “will, I predict, prove as divisive as ‘Hamnet’”, her best-known work, said Randy Boyagoda in the Financial Times. “Once again, O’Farrell has created a story replete with intensely emotive renderings of family stresses, strains and loss.” (She is sometimes accused of creating “grief porn”.) Initially rooted in western Ireland, it becomes a sprawling saga of empire-era migration. “O’Farrell offers all of this in an unceasingly ardent storytelling style. But heartstrings can only be pulled so much, for so long, before they loosen or snap.”

“Land” is ambitious and intriguing, said Melissa Harrison in The Guardian. But it “feels somehow uncomfortable in its own skin” – and strikingly short on dialogue. “Neither fable nor history nor family saga”, it is “not consistently or confidently inhabited”. But I can see it making “an epic and richly textured film”.

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.

When Judy Blume started writing in the late 1960s, the young-adult category was dominated by what were known as “problem novels”, said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker: books that “took up social issues, such as drugs and teen pregnancy”. In her work, Blume embraced contentious topics – masturbation, teen sex, “friendship drama” – but framed these not as “problems”, but as ordinary parts of adolescent experience. In the process, she pioneered a new genre: “realism for young people”.

Mark Oppenheimer, a religious-studies scholar in his 50s, may seem a somewhat incongruous chronicler of the life of the “patron saint of getting your period”. But his book is well researched and often “compelling”, even if it contains few genuinely explosive revelations (the best may be that the original draft of Blume’s adult novel, “Wifey”, included a scene “in which a dog performs oral sex on the main character”).

Blume’s early life, in the “distinctive milieu” of a secular Jewish family in post-war New Jersey, “reads like a Philip Roth novel”, said Meghan C. Kruger in The Wall Street Journal. The daughter of a dentist and a homemaker, she “grew up around adults who devoured books and could speak frankly about the human body”. Aged 21, she married a law graduate, John Blume, and soon found herself with two young children, domestic help, and a “poolside perch at the country club”. But she was emotionally and creatively unfulfilled – and so signed up for a class in writing for children.

After “nearly two years collecting rejections”, she had her breakthrough in 1970 with “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret”, the story of a “sixth-grade girl who navigates puberty through daily conversations with the divine”.

I vividly remember, aged 12 or 13, reading Blume’s “taboo-busting” 1975 novel “Forever”, said Lucy Bannerman in The Times. “Periods! Orgasms! A penis named Ralph! You didn’t get that kind of adventure in ‘Jill’s Gymkhana’.” The “audacious glimpse into adulthood” afforded by her books helps explains why they’ve sold over 90 million copies (timing helped: she began writing as cheap paperbacks were becoming widely available).

Blume, now 88, initially co-operated for this biography, but relations soured after the first draft. It’s not clear why. Though Oppenheimer delves into her personal life, including her ill-fated second marriage, he treats his subject “with the seriousness he clearly believes she deserves”, in a book that is thoughtful, but ultimately not that revealing.

“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.

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.”

From intoxicating dystopian tales to hard-hitting family dramas, young adult books are a thrilling read. These twisty page turners will have the teen in your life (or you!) staying up late to read one more chapter…

Like a Brother by Nathanael Lessore

Two starkly different estranged cousins are “thrown together” in Nathanael Lessore’s bold teen comedy, said Fiona Noble in The Observer. “Chaotic” Abass and “chilled” Owais seem to have “little in common” but, as their “bond deepens, so does each boy’s sense of self worth”. Lessore tackles hard-hitting topics, including masculinity and homophobia, with a big dose of humour. This is a huge-hearted, funny book that sensitively sheds light on the “messy, unpredictable business of being a teenager”.

A Million Tiny Miles All At Once by Lucas Maxwell

Lucas Maxwell’s remarkable debut examines “family pressures, neurodivergence and resilience with heaps of humour and heart”, said Anna Bonet in The i Paper. The story begins with 14-year-old Elias entering a school competition in the hopes of winning enough prize money to take his troubled family out for pizza. But “life at home grows increasingly complicated”, and soon unfurls into all-out chaos.

Survival Show by Juno Dawson

“Reality TV gets a ‘Black Mirror’-style makeover” in this “deliciously moreish read”, said Noble in The Observer. We follow 17-year-old Taryn, an English girl whose family is forced to seek refuge in Scotland as water levels rise in the worsening climate crisis. “Desperate to fund life-saving medication for her brother”, she signs up for a global singing contest. “The twist? All eliminated contestants are, quite literally, eliminated, ‘donating’ their lives to the ghoulish Project Population”. Dawson’s “snarky, gossipy tone” and razor-sharp “takedown of celebrity culture” are a winning combination.

Torchfire by Moira Buffini

In “Songlight”, her young-adult debut novel, Moira Buffini plunged readers into a dystopian landscape where nations are “bitterly divided by attitudes to telepathy”, said Imogen Russell Williams in The Guardian. This eagerly anticipated follow-up “pits the Brightlanders, who persecute those with ‘songlight’, against the Aylish, who prize them – and the Teroans, spacefaring telepaths who see ordinary humans as disposable”. It’s a completely absorbing tale that grips you “more fiercely” as the pages turn. “Fans will find it hard to wait” for the last book in the trilogy.

Black Star by Kwame Alexander

“Kwame Alexander is the real deal,” said Lucy Bannerman in The Times. The American poet uses “sparky verse” to tell the “powerful tale” of 12-year-old Charley, a Black girl living in the 1920s segregated American South, who dreams of becoming a professional baseball pitcher. Beautifully written, with rich characters and a vivid historical setting, this book is “a literary adrenaline shot”.

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.

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”.

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.

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.”

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”.

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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.

The Slovenian philosopher picks five novels about global catastrophe that changed his thinking. He will be speaking about the ideas in his new book – “Liberal Fascisms” – in Bristol and London on 5 and 6 May.

The Drowned World

J.G. Ballard, 1962

This work depicts a future Earth made largely uninhabitable by solar radiation. In a flooded London, scientists take advantage of societal collapse to fulfil unconscious urges. The idea that a mega-catastrophe could create an opportunity to experience jouissance – surrendering oneself to a bliss that obliterates the limits of our subjectivity – profoundly influenced me.

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin, 2006

Cixin’s masterpiece confronts Earth with Trisolaris, a planet whose unpredictable suns cause severe temperature shifts. As a critical ecologist, I see it as Earth in the near future; are we facing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”?

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

Arguably the most depressing novel I’ve ever read, it explores a society where human clones are created to supply organs for transplant, 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.

I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman, 1995

Perhaps even darker than Ishiguro’s novel, this work is about a girl locked in a bunker with 39 women. When the male guards flee, they emerge into a barren plain. The girl, the last to survive, writes about her life. Existentially, I feel like the girl: even in a crowd, I am totally alone, and my words will probably never reach their addressee. I think truly great thinkers also accept there will be no one to read them properly.

Station Eleven

Emily St John Mandel, 2014

An apocalyptic novel with a sort of happy ending. After an epidemic devastates humanity, one group, the Travelling Symphony, connects scattered communities by performing Shakespeare. I agree that, in our catastrophic predicament, we need more than just survival to survive.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Near-identical trajectories’

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

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

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

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

Reader ‘sleuthing’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star names and free films

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

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

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

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

Kid-friendly events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The novelist, journalist and broadcaster picks five of his favourite books. His latest book, “The Quantity Theory of Morality”, is published by Grove Press at £18.99.

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768-1800

François-René de Chateaubriand

A revolutionary aristocrat’s memoir that doubles as one of literature’s deepest studies of the human soul. It imagines its author speaking from beyond death, addressing a future that cannot wound him.

Being and Time

Martin Heidegger, 1927; translated by Joan Stambaugh

I reread Heidegger while facing a stem-cell transplant whose odds resembled Russian roulette. Being and Time teaches the discipline of confronting one’s own finitude – death not as abstraction but as the horizon that makes life meaningful. Whatever Heidegger’s political sins, his philosophy restores a clarity our therapeutic culture fears.

Against Nature (À rebours)

J.K. Huysmans, 1884; translated by Robert Baldick

The great novel of cultivated withdrawal. Huysmans’ hero, des Esseintes, barricades himself indoors to pursue aesthetic excess and spiritual exhaustion. A handbook for decadent reclusion – and for anyone confronting illness, solitude or the suspicion that civilisation itself may be slightly unwell.

The Epistle to the Romans

Karl Barth, 1922; translated by E.C. Hoskyns

Barth detonated early 20th-century theology with this furious commentary on Paul. If Heidegger explores the structure of being, Barth reminds us that ethics concerns action. His theology drags metaphysics back into the moral arena.

Jackdaw Cake

Norman Lewis, 1985

Lewis’ memoir of growing up in 1920s Enfield is one of the few books to treat London suburbia as a genuine habitat rather than a cultural punchline. As I walk the city’s suburban margins, Lewis reminds me that these supposedly dull territories contain entire civilisations.

Titles available at The Week Bookshop

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

Cambridge Literary Festival

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

22-26 April, cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

Bath Literature Festival

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

16-24 May, bathfestivals.org.uk

Stratford Literary Festival

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

7-10 May, stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk

Hay Festival

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

21-31 May, hayfestival.com

Bradford Literature Festival

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

3-12 July, bradfordlitfest.co.uk

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

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

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

‘Gaps in logic’

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

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

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

‘The plagiarism machine’

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

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

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

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

Middlemarch

George Eliot, 1871

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

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan, 1997

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

Waterland

Graham Swift, 1983

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

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Elif Shafak, 2024

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

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco, 1980

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

Wild Swans

Jung Chang, 1991

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

In his “superb non-fiction” and in his media appearances, John Lanchester “comes across as a thoroughly decent chap”, said James Walton in The Times. Yet his fiction has often hinted at “something darker” – a capacity for “almost gleeful nastiness”. That side was to the fore in his brilliant debut, “The Debt to Pleasure”; and it’s here again in his latest novel, the “bracingly satisfying” “Look What You Made Me Do”.

Fifty-something Kate enjoys a “comfortable life” as part of the “Oxbridge-educated middle class”, said Amanda Craig in The Spectator. Long married to Jack, a successful architect, she’s an “almost stereotypical” baby boomer. Yet when she watches the latest “hit TV series”, “Cheating”, her life is “cast into turmoil”. For the show, about a younger woman’s affair with a west London architect, contains details that make it clear that Jack has been unfaithful. As Kate plots her revenge upon its scriptwriter, what had seemed “perilously close” to being “that dread thing, a Hampstead novel”, morphs into a gripping “high-wire act between literary and commercial fiction”.

Many of the set pieces are “tremendous fun”, and “Lanchester gleefully skewers the chattering classes, from the ubiquity of Ottolenghi to the faux-rural money bubble of Soho Farmhouse”, said Clare Clark in The Guardian. Yet the novel is let down by its plotting, which is “variously implausible and clunkingly predictable”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in Literary Review. Lanchester has written of his admiration for Agatha Christie, and she would have applauded the many “ingenious” twists on display here. “Superbly well-crafted and immensely funny”, this is a “gleamingly accomplished black comedy”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

During his 13 years “at the apex of British politics”, Gordon Brown was often perceived as a “Shakespearean protagonist”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition.” Yet the Brown depicted in this “illuminating” biography is “closer to the hero of a Victorian novel”: a man “driven onwards by a moral purpose”, but beset by misfortune and tragedy.

While James Macintyre doesn’t skirt over his subject’s flaws (chiefly his “volcanic temper” and “talent for grudges”), he suggests that these are “vastly outweighed” by his “immense” achievements – which include overseeing massive reductions in child poverty as chancellor, and preventing the collapse of the entire financial system as PM through his decisive leadership after the 2008 crash.

Brown emerges as someone who defies “easy categorisation”: fiercely ambitious, he was uninterested in the “trappings of office”; famously lacking in emotional intelligence, he could be unexpectedly kind. What isn’t – or shouldn’t – be in doubt is his status as “one of the towering figures of recent British history”.

Inevitably, Macintyre devotes considerable space to the “simmering tensions” with Tony Blair, said Nicola Sturgeon in The Observer. At times, the book seems as much “an account of the New Labour project” and the “rupture” with Blair as a portrait of Brown himself. Macintyre suggests that a basic misunderstanding lay at the heart of the infamous 1994 Granita “deal” between the two, said Ethan Croft in The New Statesman. When Blair said that he would “do ten years”, Brown thought he meant ten years as Labour leader – which would have meant stepping aside in 2004. Blair “thought it meant ten years as PM” – which is what he ended up serving. Whatever the case, after Blair resigned, the crown “proved heavy” for Brown. Gripped by a new indecisiveness – most evident in his dithering over whether to call a snap election in 2007 – the “Iron Chancellor” turned into “Brown the Bottler”.

But rather like former US president Jimmy Carter, Brown has “found the respect that eluded him in his prime in his ever-active retirement”, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. Instead of seeking “unfathomable riches on the consultancy circuit”, he has devoted himself to “tireless charity work, sermons from the moral high ground and exhortations to ministers on the plight of the poor”. While Macintyre’s cataloguing of these efforts doesn’t make for especially riveting reading, a “sympathetic treatment” of Brown is “probably overdue” – and that is certainly what he has given us.

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

Glyph by Ali Smith

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

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

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

John of John by Douglas Stuart

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

Vigil by George Saunders

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

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

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

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

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

What am I, a Deer? by Polly Barton

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

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

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

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

Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir “could easily be a catalogue of horrors, and to some degree it is”, said Hadley Freeman in The Times. But what makes it such a “compelling” read is how it reveals what happens when “an atomic bomb of cruelty erupts within a seemingly normal family”.

‘Unsparing’ tale

Pelicot was 67 when, in 2020, her husband of nearly five decades was arrested for upskirting a woman in a French supermarket. The police searched his electronic devices and, when they found a cache of thousands of images and videos of him and other men raping her while she was unconscious, Pelicot “entered a nightmare”, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian.

In her memoir, she manages to capture “something glimpsed” at the 2024 trial of her husband and her other rapists (for which she waived her right to anonymity): “the transformation of Gisèle Pelicot from a self-avowedly ordinary woman” into a “figure of astonishing power”. In this “riveting account of her ordeal”, she makes it her “unsparing mission” to recount what it took to become a “national – if not global – icon”. This powerful book is a “rousing feminist manifesto” that “seeks a proper transfer of shame from sex-crime victims to their perpetrators, and the perpetrator’s enablers”, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times.

It’s an “extraordinarily courageous book”, said Freeman in The Times. Translators Ruth Diver and Natasha Lehrer have done an “excellent job” of relaying Pelicot’s “tone of determined control and occasional broken anguish” as she attempts to make sense of how the “gentle young man she married became one of the world’s most notorious rapists and abusers, without her even noticing”.

No ‘victim narrative’

This is far from a “misery memoir”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Nor does it subscribe to a “victim narrative”. Instead, Pelicot attempts to “confront the complexity of her feelings for the man who betrayed her”. Refusing to “relinquish the fond memories” she shared with him, she “takes us back to their courtship in 1971” when Dominque was “kind, shy, attentive”. Both were eager to leave behind “unhappy childhoods, hers marred by the early death of her mother, his by dysfunction and abuse”.

When her daughter, Caroline, later shares concerns that she, too, might have been one of Dominique’s victims after photos are discovered of her in her underwear, Pelicot “clings to the fact that there is no further evidence of abuse”. It’s “uncomfortable” to read her “refusal to acknowledge her daughter’s deepest fears”. Today, mother and daughter are no longer in contact.

Pelicot spends many pages wondering if she should have known that “her husband was a monster” or “sensed” something wasn’t right, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. “But the simple answer is no. Of course not.” There are some things that “no human could possibly guard against”. The overarching message seems to be that when something “of this magnitude” befalls you, there is “no point” examining whether you should have done something differently. “There is only putting one foot in front of the other. There is only what it takes to survive.”

From the outside, Sajid Javid has “led a charmed life”, said Tomiwa Owolade in The Telegraph. After 20 years as a banker, he spent 14 years in politics, rising to become home secretary and, briefly, chancellor. He was often tipped as a future prime minister. Yet we learn little of this trajectory in his memoir, which is focused on his childhood and tells a “tale of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s”, where racism was rife and education was an escape.

I found it “surprisingly moving”, if at times frustrating, said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i Paper. Javid was born to Pakistani immigrant parents in Rochdale – then a “mean, racist town”, where he learnt early on to look at the laces on the Doc Martens boots worn by the local skinheads: black laces denoted nothing to fear; red indicated a National Front supporter; yellow – the worst – meant the wearer “particularly hated Pakistanis”. Javid’s escape was education (he was the first member of his family to go to university) and love. He met his wife Laura, a “blonde beauty”, when he was 18, and married her in defiance of his parents’ wishes. Much of this book is genuinely “absorbing”, but there is a troubling “disconnect” between Javid’s childhood experiences and the “vehemently” anti-immigration policies he later pursued.

“The prose is a bit ‘Jack and Jill’,” said Hanif Kureishi in The Guardian. The book “could have done with a sharp edit”. But what Javid does capture well is the “Dickensian” precariousness of his childhood: bailiffs at the door; the stock in his dad’s corner shop never selling. And the argument it advances about meritocracy is “more nuanced than Javid’s political slogans ever were”. A second volume, documenting his rise through the Tory party, “would be fun to read if he can be as honest about that as he is about his childhood”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hay Cinema Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye, Wales

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

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

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

Barter Books, Alnwick, Northumberland

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

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

The Heath Bookshop, King’s Heath, Birmingham

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

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

Far From the Madding Crowd, Linlithgow, Scotland

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

Daunt Books, Marylebone, London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pride and snobbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hugely positive’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reread an old favorite

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

Pick the right book

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

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

Create a reading routine

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

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

Experiment with other formats

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

Feel free to skip a read

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