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.

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I Cook by Ben Lippett

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

Lugma by Noor Murad

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

All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh

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

Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens

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

The Christmas Companion by Skye McAlpine

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

Indian Kitchens by Roopa Gulati

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

Boustany by Sami Tamimi

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

Baking & the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh

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

Padella by Tim Siadatan

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

The critics’ top eight choices based on Christmas selections in national newspapers

Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang

“Wild Swans”, Jung Chang’s 1991 memoir describing her and her family’s experiences under Chinese communism, was one of the most successful non-fiction books of all time. Now, Chang has written a sequel, which picks up the story where “Wild Swans” left off – with her move to England, aged 26, in 1978. The book charts her life in England, her career as a writer and her deteriorating relationship with her homeland (she used to visit regularly, but is no longer welcome). Critics described the book as a worthy successor to the earlier memoir, though some complained that Chang revisits much material from the earlier book.

Praise:

“Chang’s use of personal and intimate experience to make unfathomable political events accessible works as triumphantly today as it did 34 years ago” (Kathryn Hughes, The Sunday Times).

“An engaging account of Chang’s life in Britain and China in the years since the Cultural Revolution ... thoughtful without being sentimental” (Rana Mitter, Literary Review).

“A gripping memoir ... Chang is brilliant at excavating the psychology of totalitarianism” (Sarah Ditum, The Times).

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s latest novel is set in 2119, in an England that is now largely under water, having been ravaged by catastrophic flooding. Although law and order have partly broken down (gangs of bandits roam the islands of the former Lake District), in other ways life doesn’t seem too different: at the University of the South Downs, lecturer Tom Metcalfe specialises in the literature of the early 21st century – a period now called “the Derangement”. Blending dystopia, campus satire and thriller, “What We Can Know” was praised for its energy and inventiveness, though a few critics found it rather baggy and disjointed.

Praise:

“Has the dullest title of any novel published this year, but is easily the best I’ve read. The prose is blissfully good, up there with Roth and Bellow in old age” (Andrew Marr, The New Statesman).

“A philosophical novel masquerading as a bizarre dystopia of climate disaster” (Antony Beevor, The Spectator).

“A piece of late-career showmanship from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure, I sometimes felt like laughing” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times).

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai’s first novel in 19 years – its predecessor, “The Inheritance of Loss”, won the 2006 Booker Prize – is a love story spanning decades about two characters from wealthy neighbouring families in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad). Sonia and Sunny both move to America as young adults, he to work as a journalist, she to study. On returning to India, they meet on a train and feel drawn to one another; but many impediments stand in their way. Critics praised Desai’s evocative writing, and her handling of themes of exile and alienation. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker; many expected it to win.

Praise:

“Full of gorgeous nature writing and rueful human comedy, exploring where to find one’s centre in a globalised world” (Justine Jordan, The Guardian).

“Magnificent ... A beautiful, haunting epic about love, loss and the search for personhood in the modern world” (Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph).

“‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ is among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people” (Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times).

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

For seven years, beginning in 2011, Sarah Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook, becoming a director of global public policy. In “Careless People”, her memoir of her time there, she paints a damning portrait of the company. Facebook, she claims, treats its employees abysmally, cynically facilitates political extremism, and is unethical in its dealings with everyone from advertisers to vulnerable teenagers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is described as a “giant man-baby”. Reviewers said that the book was enjoyable and revealing; Facebook said it was highly misleading, and took legal action to try and suppress it.

Praise:

“Sharp and funny ... a ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’-style tale of a young woman thrown into a series of improbable situations from which she manages to extricate herself” (Emma Duncan, The Times).

“Fantastically gripping ... hilariously funny, and tells the truth about our new rulers, the tech billionaire elite” (Naomi Alderman, The Spectator).

“I loved ‘Careless People’ ... a gripping account of how Facebook became a corrosive force in democracy and people’s daily lives” (Katie Martin, the Financial Times).

Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

In this work of non-fiction, two of Britain’s leading political journalists explore how Labour wrested power from the Tories after 14 years in opposition. The authors claim that the real architect of last year’s election victory – and the true power behind the throne of Keir Starmer’s administration – is the PM’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. “The Irishman”, as they call him, is depicted as a master strategist, who hand-picked Starmer to front his crusade to make Labour electable again. Reviewers generally accepted the book’s thesis, and described it as a juicy, rollicking read.

Praise:

“A gripping, exhaustively researched and fast-paced account of Starmer’s rise to power ... It reads as if the authors were alongside McSweeney and Starmer as they grapple with multiple crises” (Jason Cowley, The Sunday Times).

“The go-to book for anyone trying to understand what has gone wrong with Sir Keir Starmer’s government” (Robert Shrimsley, the Financial Times).

“McSweeney is the hero – or antihero, according to taste – of a rattling tale terrifically well told” (Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer).

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

This short novel by Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico is inspired by Georges Perec’s 1965 debut, “Things” – which chronicled the lives of two market researchers through the objects they own. In Latronico’s updated version, Anna and Tom are a pair of freelance digital creatives living in Berlin in the 2010s. Striving for a “rarefied” existence, they define themselves through their taste: owning the right objects, going to the right restaurants, obsessively curating their lives online. The novel was widely praised as a brilliant satire on millennial hipsterdom – although some argued that it itself partakes of the emptiness it strives to depict.

Praise:

“Curious and idiosyncratic” (Zadie Smith, The New Statesman).

“Latronico has written one of the most brilliantly controlled works of social realism I’ve read in a while ... made me want to whoop and vomit at the same time” (Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times).

“A crushingly sad indictment of a rootless generation – digital nomads wandering through a generic Europe ... it is funnier and far more moving than a book about the woes of late capitalism ought to be” (Daniel Swift, The Spectator).

The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes

Before he became a stuffy poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson was a surprisingly glamorous figure: habitually swathed in a black Spanish cloak, he was tall, long-haired and strikingly handsome. This “young Tennyson” is whom the acclaimed biographer Richard Holmes focuses on in his latest book, charting the poet’s unhappy childhood (his clergyman father was an alcoholic tyrant), his intellectual awakening at Cambridge, and the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam, which inspired his masterpiece “In Memoriam”. The book was praised for refining our view of Tennyson, and its vivid depiction of Victorian society.

Praise:

“Holmes proves a master of his craft ... he evokes Tennyson’s early years against the backdrop of the shifting scientific discoveries of the early 19th century” (Andrew Lycett, The Spectator).

“Holmes swats the crepe and the cobwebs away to restore the living Tennyson as he was before he fossilised into a Victorian sage” (James Marriott, The Times).

“A fascinating insight into a great British poet whose depths ... remain boundless themselves” (Constance Higgins, The Telegraph).

Flesh by David Szalay

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize charts the life of István – a Hungarian man who escapes a troubled upbringing to enjoy immense wealth in London, only to suffer a major reversal of fortune later in life. István is an unusual protagonist for a literary novel: he’s inarticulate, passive and emotionally numb. Reflecting his sparse inner life, the book is written in brutally pared back prose. Most critics described it as compulsively readable, and praised Szalay for his bold artistic choices – although some complained that István’s limitations ultimately make him a boring character.

Praise:

“A wonderfully restrained vision of one man’s life. It’s a stunning portrayal of modern masculinity and a worthy Booker winner” (Laura Hackett, The Times).

“Absolutely worth your time – a compelling, unobvious novel from an intriguingly restless writer” (Claire Lowdon, the Times Literary Supplement).

“A gripping study of the choices that can make or break a life ... Szalay draws characters superbly, drives the plot deftly, and mercilessly exposes the emptiness of such phrases as, ‘Are you okay?’ and ‘It’s okay’” (Franklin Nelson, The Spectator).

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

‘All That Crumbs Allow’

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

‘The King Cookbook’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Simply Donabe: Japanese One-Pot Recipes’

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

‘Bittersweet: The Five Tastes of Dessert and Beyond’

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

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

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

“Joanna Trollope, who has died aged 82, was one of those rare writers who can be said to have invented a genre,” said The Guardian. In the late 20th century, popular fiction written by, and mainly for, women “tended to be classified as either ‘romantic novels’ or ‘historical sagas’”. By contrast, Trollope wrote, with warmth and intelligence, about the situations and dilemmas faced by real women in their everyday lives.

The book that made her name was “The Rector’s Wife” (1991), about an attractive middle- aged woman who moves to a rural village with her increasingly embittered clergyman husband, decides that she has had enough of acting as his unpaid assistant, and takes a job in a supermarket. It knocked Jeffrey Archer off the top spot and was followed by a slew of other bestsellers.

‘Good clear stuff’

Over 30 years, she wrote about “modern life in its many and varied forms, in town and country, with razor-sharp observation and an extraordinary insight into human relationships of every kind”; yet she came to be known as the “queen of the Aga saga”. She found the label “patronising”, lazy and ignorant, said The Times. To her dismay, it stuck, but success was her best revenge: her books were translated into more than 25 languages and sold some seven million copies.

Writing in long hand, she worked from copious research notes that she called her “gerbil’s nest”. She had no pretension to be a great stylist. She described her writing as “good clear stuff”; but she believed that literature had a serious purpose. “I really believe,” she said, that “we learn more about the human condition from fiction than we do from anything else – except from life itself. I think novels help people survive, I really do.”

Supposed triviality

Joanna Trollope was born in Gloucestershire in 1943. Her father ran the City of London Building Society; her mother was a portrait painter. She was distantly related to Anthony Trollope and enjoyed his work – but said the connection had been of no professional help whatsoever. From Reigate County School for Girls, she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where her tutors included J.R.R. Tolkien.

Not long after graduating, she married a banker, David Potter, settled in London and raised two daughters while working part-time as a teacher; she started writing historical novels in the evenings, under the pen name Caroline Harvey. When her marriage ended, she moved to the Cotswolds; it was her second husband, the dramatist Ian Curteis, who persuaded her to write about modern life. They divorced in 2001 and she returned to London in 2005.

Away from her writing, she supported Chelsea FC, and numerous charities. Asked on “Desert Island Discs” about the supposed triviality of her novels, she paraphrased Virginia Woolf: “It is a grave mistake to think there is more significance in great things than in little things.”

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

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

‘Not-so-pretty’ sales

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

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

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

‘Refuge rather than clarity’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Capitalism: A Global History’ by Sven Beckert

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

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

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

‘American Canto’ by Olivia Nuzzi

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

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

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

Whether you’re a bookworm or you just love beautiful buildings, there’s something special about libraries. The UK is home to plenty of these peaceful, book-lined sanctuaries, filled with cosy nooks for reading to your heart’s content and escaping the bustle of the outside world. These are our favourites.

John Rylands Library, Manchester

Opened to the public on Deansgate in 1900, this stunning library was founded by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her late husband, the entrepreneur and philanthropist John Rylands. It became part of Manchester University in 1972, and is home to an array of rare books including the Gutenberg Bible and all four of Shakespeare’s Folios. The building itself is one of “neo-Gothic splendour”, said Countryfile, and the main reading room is dotted with tranquil “reading alcoves” and colourful stained glass windows.

The Bodleian, Oxford

“In terms of English libraries, this is the magnum opus,” said The Sunday Times. Founded in 1602 by diplomat and scholar Thomas Bodley, it’s one of the country’s oldest libraries and “feels like the library at Hogwarts: think domed reading rooms, gothic vaulting, stained glass and wooden shelves stuffed with books from floor to ceiling”. Consider booking a guided tour for access to the “normally off-limits” 15th-century Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Chancellor’s Court, “where students were tried for misdeeds”.

The Leeds Library

This historic spot has a “special claim to fame: it’s the oldest surviving lending library in the UK”, said The Sunday Times. Founded in 1768 by a “forward-thinking society of northern notables”, it’s a members-only library, but you can book to visit on Thursday evenings between 5 and 7pm. “Grade II listed and set around a glass-roofed atrium, framed by wooden balustrades and shelves, it’s a bookworm’s delight.”

National Poetry Library, London

Located on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall, overlooking the Thames in London’s Southbank Centre, “you’ll find a warm yellow glow radiating from the doors of the National Poetry Library”, said Condé Nast Traveller. Founded by the Arts Council and opened in 1953 by TS Eliot and Herbert Read, the “cosy” space is home to more than 200,000 books, magazines and audio visual materials. Drop by to listen as poets read their work “in front of the huge, rainbow-coloured archives”, and take children to visit the Little Library, where they can “pore over picture books, play games and solve puzzles”.

Canada Water Library, London

Sitting next to the Canada Water basin, this striking library “resembles a concrete ship that’s run aground”, said Condé Nast Traveller. Designed by CZWG Architects, the aluminium-clad building was opened by Southwark Council in 2011, and won several prizes including a RIBA award. Now, it’s a community hub hosting reading clubs, writing groups and author events. “With checked carpets, sleek wood interiors and suspended giant orb lights, it’s a wonderful space to while away the day.”

Gladstone’s Library, Flintshire

This “literary oasis” in North Wales, founded by former prime minister William Gladstone in 1889, is the UK’s only residential library, said the BBC. Home to 26 bedrooms “just steps from the books”, it’s the perfect spot for “anyone who has ever dreamed of spending a cosy holiday reading, writing or focusing in silence”. The “imposing russet stone building” is home to a “150,000-tome-strong collection”, a handful of reading rooms, a wood-panelled dining room with “views over the manicured gardens”, and a “cosy study” with comfy chairs to “flop into” with a book.

If the Tudors “exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors”, it is largely “because we can all picture them so clearly”, said Peter Marshall in Literary Review. And that, in turn, is down to one man: the German artist Hans Holbein. Between the late 1520s and the early 1540s, Holbein lived mostly in England and produced an “extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings” of Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers.

Today, as Elizabeth Goldring explains in her “superb and groundbreaking biography”, it is hard to “appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them”.

Before he emerged, portraiture was a fairly underdeveloped art form in northern Europe. Yet suddenly, as Goldring puts it, here was a painter who made viewers feel that they’d been “granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings”. No wonder that Holbein – a “workaholic” and also a “relentless pragmatist, willing at the drop of a brush to change artistic direction or abandon sinking patrons for rising ones” – thrived in the cut-throat Tudor world.

Holbein was born in Augsburg in 1497, the son of an artist, Hans Holbein the Elder, who specialised in altarpieces. He got his “big break” in 1523, when the humanist scholar Erasmus commissioned him to paint his portrait, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Erasmus introduced Holbein to Henry VIII’s courtier, Thomas More, who became his chief patron during an early stint in England in the late 1520s.

Returning a few years later, Holbein had to navigate More’s execution in 1535 – at which point he “shrewdly pivoted towards the new man Thomas Cromwell” – and then Cromwell’s downfall in 1540, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian.

Despite such ructions, Holbein remained in Henry’s favour until his death, from the plague, in 1543. Thanks to Goldring’s “careful analysis” of his work, aided by more than 250 high-quality reproductions, “Holbein the artist comes vividly to life”, said Katherine Harvey in The Times.

The man himself remains more elusive, but “there are glimpses of a less than exemplary private life”: Holbein effectively abandoned his wife, Elsbeth, and their children in Germany while he pursued success in England, and while here he “fathered at least two children”.

In both life and art, Holbein had a “talent for catching every rising tide”, said Mathew Lyons in The Spectator. Goldring’s “superbly scholarly biography” will surely prove the “definitive account” of this remarkable figure “for many years to come”.

From daring contemporary collections to the long-awaited definitive edition from one of the major poets of the 20th century, this is our pick of the best poetry books of the year. Whether you’re a budding poet or you’re looking for the perfect gift for the bookworm in your life, these are the releases worth reading from cover to cover.

The Book of Jonah, by Luke Kennard

Luke Kennard “daringly” remixes his “source material and inspirations” in his latest collection, said The Guardian. The acclaimed British poet moves Jonah, the “minor prophet out of the Bible into a world of arts conferences, where he is continually reminded that his presence everywhere is mostly futile”. Each section of the collection starts with a “lecture where this Jonah tries to justify his action, or lack thereof”, said The Telegraph. Poems that initially appear lengthy and opaque are “made welcoming with an irresistible energy”. At times, it feels like you’re being “regaled by a tipsy professor of theology in a pub, whose riffing gets wilder and wilder until they fall off their stool”. Filled with poems that will leave you “both smiling and wincing”, it’s a “brilliant” collection.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney

It’s been 12 years since Seamus Heaney died and the “project to produce a definitive collection of his poetry is complete”, said the Financial Times. The main draw is the “substantial amount of previously uncollected and unpublished work” which has been pulled together in chronological order. This will no doubt “sharpen our curiosity” about why these words by the great Irish poet were originally left out. “A treat for Heaney completists.”

Southernmost: Sonnets, by Leo Boix

“The sonnet sequence may seem as unlikely a 21st-century cultural force as the altarpiece triptych or the harpsichord concerto,” said The Telegraph. “But it’s alive and sparkling”. Argentinian-British poet Leo Boix’s second collection comprises 100 sonnets covering everything from “religion and upbringing” to “love and sexuality”. His latest book is “unflinching in its attention to Argentine history”; Boix includes “lively anecdotes” about his family, alongside a “reckoning with the long shadow of colonialism”. And his poems about his relationship with his husband, Pablo, are both “beautiful” and “unsentimental”, charting the “rhythms and negotiations of a real partnership”.

Chaotic Good, by Isabelle Baafi

This “playful and sharp” examination of escaping a toxic marriage is a must-read, said The Guardian. Delving into the erosion of identity and how we manage to find ourselves again, Isabelle Baafi’s collection is filled with poems that “absolutely know their power and revel in it”. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and winner of the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, it’s a piercing debut that will stay with you long after the final page.

The Empire of Forgetting, by John Burnside

The late John Burnside “conveyed an infectious love of the world”, which is “heightened” in his posthumous collection, said the Financial Times. “His laser-sharp eye for the beauty of nature, strands of memory both personal and literary, and an undeniable sense of an ending, together take on a spiritual dimension.” This is a moving, personal collection which confronts mortality, drawing on Burnside’s own health issues and brushes with death.

Lode, by Gillian Allnutt

“Gillian Allnutt may be the best living British poet you’ve never heard of,” said The Telegraph. Her work “dwells in the overlooked and the austere”, often examining her family connections and the lives of women throughout history. Her tenth collection opens with a reflection on her visit to Buckingham Palace, where she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2016. Later, she “revisits the death of her mother’s brother”, an RAF navigator who was shot down in 1943, ending the poem with the line “‘You’d have liked him,’ she said to me / often. I think I would have done.” This is Allnutt at her best: “plain speech made devastating”.

‘Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right’ by Laura K. Field

To truly understand MAGA, you need a person who’s “from that world, but not of it,” said Alexandre Lefebvre in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Though political theorist Laura K. Field cut ties with the conservative intelligentsia several years before its factions coalesced behind Donald Trump, she earned her Ph.D. as a member of that circle. In her “smart, stylish, scathingly critical” taxonomy of the New Right, she describes the movement as consisting of four factions, including the think-tank intellectuals at the Claremont Institute, the more programmatic postliberals, the National Conservatives, and the hard right. “Whether intended or not, Furious Minds reads like Dante’s Inferno: The deeper we go, the worse everyone becomes.” Yet Field’s greater contribution is that she dispels the myth that the New Right is unified solely by its hatred of pluralism and liberalism. Instead, as she writes, “it thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the good, the right, and the beautiful.’”

“What should we make of the intellectual aspect of MAGA?” asked Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. The answer matters, because if Donald Trump’s reign lasts only three more years, the movement may be sustainable only if it’s grounded in a coherent set of principles. However, while every political movement contains contradictions, “the contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique disconnect between thinking and reality.” Field attributes this to conservatism’s addiction to abstractions, and indeed, “the New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas—not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, ‘the Common Good,’ and more.” But abstractions and the complexity of the real world are often at odds. For example, Trump’s NatCon allies trumpet “nationalism” of a sort that’s rooted in monolithic cultures. But how could a centuries-old melting-pot nation become monolithic? “You can’t deport half of America.”

At times, Field’s criticisms go too far, said Richard M. Reinsch II in The Wall Street Journal. She identifies a 2022 speech by Israeli-born writer Yoram Hazony as the moment when the NatCons’ mask slipped off, revealing white supremacy and explicit Christian nationalism at the movement’s core. Alas, “the first term is a smear, the second an ill-defined shock term,” and Field meanwhile neglects to make the more salient point that the group asserts a form of nationalism divorced from the principles outlined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Field also has little to say about the “ludicrous descent of modern liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism,” and with all due respect to the useful work she has performed here, “this descent has done far more to birth the furious minds of the New Right than the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.

‘The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare’ by Daniel Swift

In William Shakespeare’s time, “literature wasn’t just the result of inspired genius,” said Ed Simon in The New York Times. “It also required carpenters, weavers, and brick-layers,” and Daniel Swift’s “brilliant” new book illuminates why that’s so. Swift brings us back to 1576 London, when an actor and craftsman named James Burbage took a chance and erected, just outside London, England’s first purpose-built playhouse since Roman rule. It was called simply the Theatre, and Shakespeare would apprentice there. It also premiered some of the Bard’s greatest plays, and Swift gets to that. But The Dream Factory is foremost “an indispensable account of a chaotic and creative period in which feudalism was transitioning into capitalism, with the entertainment industry one of the salient harbingers of that shift.” It all makes for “riveting reading.”

“There is plenty to interest the passionate Shakespearean here,” said Will Tosh in The New Spectator (U.K.). “Burbage’s innovation created the conditions for a new theater industry and a brand-new profession,” the one Shakespeare soon joined. “I was taken with the idea that Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be imagined as his ‘masterpieces’”—meaning the works he produced to finish his climb from apprentice playwright to master. Every play staged at Burbage’s theater emerged from a city where commercial activity was fueled by guilds of craftsmen and merchants. Not only did the guilds build the theaters, they also created the collectivist approach to financing that allowed the theaters to turn actors into salaried employees.

“As Swift makes clear, the Theatre endured only because Burbage was good at improvising and snookering his partners,” said Isaac Butler in The Atlantic. He also attracted a “staggering” number of lawsuits, the source of many of the details that carry Swift’s story. In the end, the Theatre was shuttered and disassembled and its beams repurposed to construct the more famous Globe in 1599. By then, though, Burbage’s venture had given the world Shakespeare, proving that “another important kind of brilliance is necessary for the flourishing of the arts: business acumen.”

The author of the global hit “Eat, Pray, Love” picks books about women overcoming difficulty. Her memoir, “All the Way to the River”, explores her relationship with a friend and lover who died in 2018.

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson, 1972

In this slim, magical novel, a wild young girl and her equally wild grandmother spend the summer on a remote Finnish island, using adventure and creativity to heal from loss. Never has childhood girl power been more eloquently expressed. I call this my favourite book nobody has ever read.

The Awakened Woman

Dr Tererai Trent, 2017

There is no easy pathway from rural African poverty, illiteracy and early marriage to a doctoral degree in America – but in this memoir, Trent shows how she created that path for herself, with relentless drive and the guidance of her ancestors. This is the heroic journey of a woman I admire more than anyone else I’ve met.

Matrix

Lauren Groff, 2021

Plenty of women in history have been sent to convents as punishment, but in Groff’s brilliant, muscular novel, the 12th century mystical poet Marie de France takes that banishment and turns it into might, becoming a leader who transforms her convent into a world of creativity, prosperity and autonomy for all women.

How to Say Babylon

Safiya Sinclair, 2023

Raised in the crushing patriarchy of contemporary Jamaica, Sinclair fought back against the limitations of her father and Rastafarian culture to become a magnificent poet, traveller and author. She wrote her way out of poverty and oppression, and the result, this gorgeous memoir, is pure fire.

Harley Loco

Rayya Elias, 2013

My new book tells the story of my friendship and love with Rayya Elias, but in this memoir, she tells her own harrowing story of immigration, alienation, drug addiction, music and recovery. Raw and unflinching, her voice continues to shine long after her death.

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop

Since his death, aged 44, in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson has had a “distinctly mixed” literary reputation, said Andrew Motion in The New Statesman.

To many modernists, and especially the Bloomsbury Group, his adventure-filled novels – among them “Treasure Island”, “Kidnapped” and “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” – “looked old hat”. Like Kipling, he has sometimes seemed to be “on the wrong side of history”, and has been dismissed as a mere children’s writer. Yet he hasn’t lacked for heavyweight admirers – Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilary Mantel – and has remained popular with general readers.

In his “sensible, sympathetic and thorough” biography, the American scholar Leo Damrosch chronicles Stevenson’s “fascinating” life and offers “wise” judgements about his work. “Stevenson was a wonderful man and at his best a great writer”: this “valuable book” captures those qualities.

Born in Edinburgh in 1850, “Stevenson was not supposed to be a writer”, said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. His grandfather and father were civil engineers, responsible for many of Scotland’s earliest lighthouses, and they expected him to enter the family business.

But the “sickly” young man – who was plagued all his life by “bad lungs” – was drawn instead to a bohemian milieu. A “stupendous conversationalist”, who wore “velvet jackets and flamboyant sashes”, Stevenson fitted in easily: he befriended writers such as Edmund Gosse and Henry James (as well as the one-legged poet and editor William Ernest Henley, who helped inspire Long John Silver) and began publishing essays and travel articles. “Much to the grief of his Presbyterian parents”, he also declared himself an atheist.

In 1876, while in France, Stevenson “fell completely” for Fanny Osbourne, an American 10 years his senior with an estranged husband back in California, said David Mills in The Sunday Times. He followed her to America (though the journey “nearly killed him”) and they married in 1880. They settled in Bournemouth, but later moved to America, and “ultimately on to Samoa where, in 1894, Stevenson died of a stroke”.

Although Stevenson is a riveting subject, Damrosch’s ignorance of Britain leads to some errors – as when he claims that “Cockfield in Sussex” lies “40 miles east of Cambridge”. But this is, overall, a “generous and capacious account”, marked by “satisfying touches of offhand laconic wit”, said Margaret Drabble in the TLS. As such, it’s a “fitting tribute” to a “master storyteller”.

It has been more than 200 years since “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Emma” were published, yet the words and wit of Jane Austen remain enthralling as ever. This is a big year for Austen fans: Dec. 16 marks the author's 250th birthday, and boutique hotels on both sides of the Atlantic are celebrating her life and legacy through special programming and events.

Henry’s Townhouse, Marylebone, London

This “charming” Georgian townhouse once belonged to Austen’s brother Henry, and it “played a pivotal role” in Jane’s life, said Elle Decor. She spent the night here during visits to London, and now you can too, as it has been transformed into a six-bedroom boutique hotel. Each room is named in honor of an Austen relative and “designed as a glamorous reimagining of the Regency period,” with rich fabrics and antique art and furniture. There are modern amenities too, like Dyson hairdryers and a mini-bar filled with Press smoothies and British artisan spirits.

The Queensberry Hotel, Bath, England

Austen called Bath home from 1801 to 1806, and the city still celebrates its most famous resident with events like the annual Grand Regency Costumed Promenade through the streets. The Queensberry Hotel, just down the road from the Jane Austen Center, is in the middle of the action. Comprising four Georgian townhouses, the property is “full of personality, without ever laying it on too thick,” said the Michelin Guide. The floor plans are a little “quirky” and the “architectural details distinctive,” leaving you to wonder how Austen herself would have described the place. To commemorate her birthday, the hotel is offering the Jane Austen Experience, which includes two tickets to the Jane Austen Center and a special 250th anniversary tote bag.

Oakley Hall Hotel, Hampshire, England

This Hampshire countryside escape was built in 1795 by Austen’s friend Wither Bramston, and the writer would detail her visits to the home in letters to her sister Cassandra. Legend also has it that the Lady Bertram character in “Mansfield Park” was based on Bramston’s wife, Mary. It’s easy to see why Austen enjoyed coming over: The manor sits on 315 acres of beautiful lawn and gardens and boasts original features like parquet wooden floors and big fireplaces.

Book the Jane Austen Experience for perks like a ticket to Jane Austen’s House in nearby Chawton, where she penned “Pride and Prejudice” and her other novels. Oakley Hall Hotel is close to many Austen sites, including Steventon, the village she lived in as a child, and Winchester Cathedral, her burial site.

One Aldwych, Covent Garden, London

Covent Garden was one of Austen’s haunts, where she attended the theater and stopped by her brother’s home at 10 Henrietta Street. Around the corner at One Aldwych, guests can learn more about the author’s time in the area through the hotel’s Curators program.

Writer and historian Dr. Matthew Green leads a spirited guided walk past the places she visited, and the tour ends with mince pies and mulled wine. This is one of several events happening over the holidays to celebrate Austen, with other highlights including special drinks at the Lobby Bar (try the Gin Austen with apricot brandy and Champagne) and a silhouette portrait artist.

Deer Path Inn, Lake Forest, Illinois

Stepping into the Deer Path Inn feels like being “transported back in time to an English countryside estate,” said Travel and Leisure. The “Tudor-style facade” and “nostalgic wood paneling” are warm and inviting and dining on bangers and mash and shepherd’s pie in the White Hart Pub is “like a vacation to the Old World.” The Austen Escape package ties in perfectly with the storybook setting, and includes an English-themed welcome amenity, English breakfast in bed, candlelit dinner with a Regency-inspired menu and nighttime turndown service with tea and sweets.

‘Mexico: A 500-Year History’ by Paul Gillingham

“Mexico and Mexicans have had just about enough of being analyzed,” said Camilla Townsend in The Washington Post, and historian Paul Gillingham fully understands that. His “breathtaking” new book “reveals Mexican history in all its kaleidoscopic complexity,” and though his account does nothing to downplay the upheavals the nation has endured, it centers the successes rather than the struggles of the land’s people while emphasizing their remarkable diversity. Fittingly, his account starts not with conquistador Hernán Cortés toppling the Aztec empire in 1521 but with a poor Spaniard, Gonzalo Guerrero, who survived a shipwreck several years earlier, chose to live among the Maya as a Maya, and fathered three children who can fairly be labeled the first Mexicans. Though Gillingham’s account runs 700 pages, he “writes with sparkling verve,” and “every one of those pages is worth reading.”

For 300 years, the nation that Cortés christened New Spain was “the glittering jewel in the Spanish crown,” said Gerard Helferich in The Wall Street Journal. It encompassed most of the land west of the Mississippi in today’s U.S., its corn fed a global population boom, and its silver helped double Europe’s money supply. But the wealth was concentrated among a small elite, and an 1810 uprising sparked a war that led to Mexico’s independence in 1821 and the establishment of a republic. Sixty years of instability followed, amid which Mexico ceded more than half its territory to the U.S. Leaders came and went, including the French-appointed emperor Maximilian I, the reformer Benito Juárez, and the military dictator Porfirio Díaz, before the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution launched a new century characterized by both growth and repression. Gillingham’s “vibrant and thought-provoking account” captures it all.

But while he chronicles each shift in power, “this is not where the author’s heart lies,” said Álvaro Enrigue in The New York Times. Gillingham forever calls attention to the ground-level experiences of the communities that compose Mexico because he judges the country to be the first on Earth where so many different groups—beginning with the land’s Indigenous people, Spanish settlers, and the many enslaved Africans and Asians who arrived during Spain’s rule—came together and created an enduring nation. “At times, as Gillingham makes clear, democracy of the Mexican variety has outshined the American kind,” managing to seat the hemisphere’s first Black president in 1829 and its first Indigenous president in 1858. More importantly, “he understands, as Mexicans do, that it is a miracle that the country exists at all,” especially given how often it has been the subject of tugs of war between other empires.

‘When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy’ by David Margolick

“Sid Caesar did not look like a comic,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. In the early 1950s, when his fame peaked, the TV pioneer “might have passed for a lawyer or a department store manager.” But unlike other funny-men of the era, who told jokes and did shtick, Caesar “could become almost anything, throwing himself into roles with shattering power.” David Margolick’s new book about Caesar and the early days of television captures the performer’s special talent and lasting influence, yet Margolick distinguishes himself as “an ideal cultural historian” because he’s “curious and loving enough to incorporate every telling detail but too wary of nostalgia to slip into ballyhoo.” The Sid Caesar who emerges in this telling is “both funny and tragic”—“a revolutionary talent whose particular success may have been possible only in a brand-new medium.”

Though few people under 70 remember Caesar, “his comedic DNA is everywhere,” said Ann Levin in The Forward. A son of Jewish immigrants and a product of the Catskills comedy circuit, he specialized in sketch comedy, and despite being introverted offstage, “he could bring down the house by impersonating everything from an imperious German general to a fly crawling on a piece of feta cheese.” In 1950, NBC awarded him with his own live 90-minute Saturday-night sketch show. Your Show of Shows spoofed contemporary TV and film, dazzled critics, and drew 25 million viewers a week at its apex. The show’s legendary writers room was populated by future comedy luminaries Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon.

“What wasn’t funny was Caesar’s own life,” said Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal. A stormy drinker, he never found a true second act after his shortened sketch show, Caesar’s Hour, was canceled in 1957, having been eclipsed by Lawrence Welk’s anodyne music-variety program. Margolick “brilliantly summarizes Sid Caesar’s fall,” describing him as too sophisticated to perform mainstream comedy and too difficult and stubborn to find an alternate path. A mere 11 years after his death, he is barely known, and yet “the world without him is a less amusing place.”

It may have involved “just 16 minutes of screen time”, but Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs” was “one of the great performances”, said Ed Potton in The Times.

With his “hiss-slurp” modelled on the sound Bela Lugosi’s Dracula made when he saw blood, and his smile based on Joseph Stalin’s, Hopkins was so convincing as the cannibalistic psychiatrist that his co-star, Jodie Foster, “was scared of him throughout”. It earned him the first of his two Oscars (the second came in 2021, for his role in “The Father”) and “crowned one of the most illustrious but tortured of acting careers”.

As the 87-year-old relates in his tautly gripping memoir, such success wasn’t bad for a “Welsh kid” whose baker father called him “thick as two short planks”.

At boarding school (paid for by “wealthy relations”), Hopkins was a “hopeless student”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But when an English teacher asked him to recite a poem, his “voice came to life”: poetry, he says, is what “launched him”. Leaving school a “no-hoper”, he went to Rada on a grant – and “to the astonishment of his parents was on stage with Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic within 10 years”.

Yet life hasn’t been easy for Hopkins, who was diagnosed with a form of Asperger’s syndrome in his 70s, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. To calm what he calls the “ticktock of voices” in his head, he drank prodigiously as a young man; though he quit in 1975, it was “not before walking out on his first wife and their infant daughter, Abigail” – something he deeply regrets.

He admits he had few friends and he “could turn very nasty”. Unusually for a showbiz memoir, “We Did OK, Kid” is “more concerned with the inner journey than the outer”. But that’s no bad thing: it’s also a “page-turner”.

“Between early May and early July of this year, much of Australia’s collective imagination was absorbed by the trial of Erin Patterson,” said Jason Steger in the Financial Times.

The 51-year-old stood accused of murdering her estranged husband’s parents, along with one of his aunts, by serving them a beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms. Patterson was also charged with the attempted murder of the aunt’s husband, who narrowly survived.

Among those present throughout the trial, which ended in Patterson’s conviction, were the writers and long-time friends Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. Thinking they might make a podcast, they recorded their conversations on their drives to and from the courthouse near Leongatha, the small town in Victoria where “the deadly dish was served”. The podcast didn’t materialise. Instead, what we have is this “hybrid”, which splices their transcribed conversations with passages written in their collective voice. While many might have preferred a “full account” written by any one of the three, this is a compelling book with “pace and staying power”.

In a media ecosystem glutted with “murdertainment”, there are precious few works of true crime that don’t “make you feel scummy”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. But “The Mushroom Tapes”, with its “self-questioning about the ethics of its own project”, proves an exception.

The “fascination” the authors feel stems largely from Patterson’s “seeming normalcy”. What led this apparently unremarkable woman to “poison four people, none of whom she had any obvious reason to want dead”? A “true-crime buff” whose closest friendships were with a group of fellow murder obsessives, Patterson planned her crime meticulously, “from foraging for the death caps to the recipe for beef wellington to the fatal dose required”. But in other ways she was “ludicrously sloppy” – failing, for instance, to come up with a “convincing story about where the mushrooms came from”.

“‘The Mushroom Tapes’ offers two spectacles in one,” said Owen Richardson in The Sydney Morning Herald: “the Patterson trial, and famous writers hanging out together”. Although at times there is too much “self-conscious significance hunting” – “the mushroom metaphors sprout like mushrooms” – the authors are “sensitive and insightful” observers. But in the end, they’re defeated by the “black box that is Erin Patterson”.

“I felt that the joke was on us,” said Hooper. “We thought we were going to get Medea and it was actually Karen.”

‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway’s best-selling book “begins in appropriately manly fashion,” said Brian Stewart in Commentary. Batting away a tenet of liberal orthodoxy, he declares that there’s no such thing as “toxic masculinity” because bullying and predation are the antithesis of authentic masculine behavior. “Real men don’t start bar fights,” he writes. “They break them up.” What makes that assertion remarkable is “not so much the argument itself as where it’s coming from.” Unlike so many of today’s champions of “men’s rights,” Galloway is no reactionary. A millionaire investor turned podcaster and New York University marketing professor, the 61-year-old aligns as a Democrat and welcomes the progress women continue to make toward professional and economic equality. In his view, though, men’s true purpose is threefold: to “protect, provide, and procreate.” And while Notes on Being a Man is mostly memoir, “it is meant to serve as a kind of self-help guide for young men who are alone and adrift.”

I don’t envy Galloway, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. “He seeks the dubious distinction of being a better version of a very bad thing”: a champion of men who insists on drawing a sharp line between men’s and women’s needs. Though he doesn’t hate women, as far-right influencers Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes do, he does propose that men have a different moral orientation that is an outgrowth of physical differences. And by casting men as society’s “providers” and “protectors,” he reinforces the notion that men naturally hold the superior position. In other words, he’s buttressing “the same ugly hierarchy we have always had.”

“Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about 75 years ago,” said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. In the 1930s, he reminds us, American men built the Hoover Dam astonishingly quickly and a decade later ventured overseas and defeated fascism. To prove that today’s young men are in crisis, he cites familiar statistics about male unemployment and suicide rates, yet he doesn’t mention that women attempt suicide more frequently or that they can match men’s earnings only by gaining an education edge. In fact, “if you tilt some of the most commonly cited data points this way or that, you can just as easily argue on the behalf of a woman crisis as a man crisis—or, perhaps most accurately, for an ongoing crisis affecting us all.” In the end, Galloway is forced to argue that men feel the pain of economic anxiety more acutely than women, which doesn’t sound very manly at all. “So why make this about manhood?” Galloway’s ideal modern man could be described as “a kind and conscientious sort who aspires to make a decent living and who looks after their loved ones.” Those traits, fortunately and curiously, “seem blessedly gender-free.”

‘Bread of Angels: A Memoir’ by Patti Smith

“How many memoirs can a richly lived life fill?” asked David Hajdu in The New York Times. Patti Smith has now written several autobiographical books of poetry and prose, “yet one of the marvels of Bread of Angels is that, for a work by a memoirist of uncommon prolificacy, it is remarkably fresh.” Fifteen years after Just Kids, a portrait of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that earned her a National Book Award, she has produced a cradle-to-today account of her 79 years that sheds light on life chapters she’s said little about before. “Smith lingers with particular affection on early childhood,” while the book’s biggest reveal may be its “slow, warm” section on the decade-plus that she spent raising two kids in Michigan after she and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of the band MC5, withdrew from the cultural spotlight in 1979.

“Smith’s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Born in 1946, she was raised in southern New Jersey by loving parents with little money and sustained herself on the power of imagination. Though often sick, she was also resilient, and “her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes.” The pace of the memoir accelerates once Smith boards a bus to New York City at 20, writes and performs poetry, and falls in with an array of other super talents, including Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, and Susan Sontag. Her own fame explodes with the release of her 1975 debut album, Horses.

Fred’s death in 1994, at just 46, is “followed by a cascade of other losses,” which in turn “trigger a creative rebirth,” said Will Hermes in The Guardian. We see the godmother of punk return to writing and performing, and she has barely slowed since. Her voice on the page, it should be noted, “can take some getting used to,” because it’s “oddly formal” and can feel repetitive and indulgent. “But once you settle in, it casts a potent spell, and you’ll learn as much about the artist from her style as from the stories themselves.” Clearly, the Patti Smith we have known and see here in full gave birth to herself. In effect, “she sang herself into being.”

The former deputy PM and president of global affairs at Meta picks five favourites. He will be speaking about his book, “How to Save the Internet”, at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend.

Life & Times of Michael K

J.M. Coetzee, 1983

Possibly my favourite book of all time, mostly because of the taut, sparse prose. It generates a stunning effect. There is simply not a word out of place – and every word resonates with meaning.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys, 1966

A prequel to “Jane Eyre”, which takes us to Jamaica, through the life and marriage of the soon-to-be Mrs Rochester, the madwoman of the attic. An agonisingly poignant novel, made all the more so by the fact that Jean Rhys wrote it while living in poverty and obscurity; the recognition it earned her came far too late.

Far North

Marcel Theroux, 2009

I’m not sure if I would have read this if Marcel were not a lifelong friend – but it’s one of his best: quite chilling, a bit eccentric and haunting. A story about a solitary figure called Makepeace who journeys through a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape. If you like post-apocalyptism – which unfortunately feels rather more relevant these days – then this is one for you.

Plough, Sword and Book

Ernest Gellner, 1988

I first encountered this when I was at uni in the mid-1980s. It is an imperiously sweeping (critics would claim over-sweeping, and over-European) view of how humans evolved through plough, sword and book. As an undergraduate wanting to be exposed to big ideas, it felt like a meteor full of them.

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalism

Conrad Russell, 1999

Not a partisan pick, I promise! So pithy, and it describes an enduring truth – that liberalism is in essence about power, and how to disperse it and make it accountable. It is somewhat out of step with our populist times, obviously, but all the more important for it.

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop

In 1921, a Bolshevik pamphlet proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a “fairy-tale country” for women. “That was, of course, an exaggeration,” said Francesca Angelini in The Sunday Times. Nonetheless, women were granted sweeping rights during the Revolution (including to abortion and equal pay) and, from the early Soviet era on, many received a “formidable education”. The result was that the Soviet Union was packed with “strong” professional women: doctors, scientists, judges, professors.

In this “brilliantly executed” book, the Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe “examines the lives of the women of her country” over the past century. Her subjects include Alexandra Kollontai, who in 1917 became the “world’s first female cabinet minister”; the “hotshot Second World War sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko”; and Yulia Navalnaya, a prominent economist and the widow of Alexei Navalny.

Ioffe, whose family moved to the US in 1990, when she was seven, herself comes from a line of extraordinary “ordinary” women, said Viv Groskop in The Guardian. Two great-grandmothers were doctors; her grandmother “oversaw the plant that supplied the Kremlin’s drinking water”.

This heritage meant that when Ioffe returned to Moscow in 2009, she “expected a city filled by women brimming with intellectual and professional ambitions”, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “Instead, she met women whose highest goal in life seemed to be to attract a man.” She wonders how a “country of women freedom fighters became a country of aspiring housewives”, and suggests the blame lies with Russia’s men, who made women shoulder too much during the Soviet era – so that they yearned for a return to “traditional values”. Her “enthralling” book has a “bleak” conclusion: that Russia’s “efflorescence of emancipation” is gone.

As Donald Trump threatens to sue the BBC over how his speech was edited by “Panorama”, journalist Andy Webb has “chucked a load of petrol on the bonfire” with his “extraordinary” new book, said Lucy Denyer in The Telegraph.

“Dianarama: the Betrayal of Princess Diana” examines the “explosive” interview between Martin Bashir and Diana in 1995, broadcast by the BBC and watched by 23 million people in the UK. Because of Bashir’s actions and, “more importantly”, because of the ensuing cover-up, “Diana’s life had been sent off on a terribly dangerous course, resulting in her death”, claims Webb.

This is “punchy stuff”. At the start, it’s “tempting” to “suspect Webb of amplifying the incident” – but as his “meticulously researched and carefully crafted book unfolds”, it becomes clear that Bashir’s “Panorama” interview with Diana “carried more weighty implications” than were first apparent.

It’s clear Webb has an “endearing soft spot for Diana”, and holds no grudge against King Charles. “All his ire is instead directed at two targets: Bashir and the BBC.” The first part of the book tackles how Bashir “lied, faked and forged” his path to the interview, while the second shines a light on how the corporation sought to “cover its back” after the story broke.

Webb offers some “fascinating nuggets”. Diana’s famous “there were three of us in this marriage” line, for example, actually referred not to Camilla Parker-Bowles but to the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, “with whom Bashir had convinced Diana that Charles was having an affair”.

“Dianarama” charts Webb’s “decades-long campaign to uncover the truth”, said Kate Mansey in The Times. Among his claims is the “extraordinary scale of Bashir’s lies”, including “astonishing allegations” that “Prince Edward had Aids”, her son Prince William was recording her with a “special watch”, and the Queen would “abdicate within six months”.

Other striking revelations include a memo that Diana asked her lawyer, Lord Mishcon, to record days before the “Panorama” interview, in which she said she “believed she would be hurt, possibly in a staged car crash”, and a collection of “mysterious” BBC documents that allegedly “went missing”.

Webb also explores claims of a “cover-up within a cover-up”: he speaks to Richard Eyre, a BBC governor at the time of the initial investigation who tells him the board “‘would have insisted on a full-scale inquiry’ had they not been kept in the dark about Bashir’s deceit”.

“Some readers might look at ‘Dianarama’, shrug and think it old history,” said Denyer in The Telegraph. But Webb reminds us it is a story that “will not go away”. He has “reopened a writhing can of worms”.

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The latest books are not playing around. This month’s new releases are searing and serious stories of women’s suffering, wrath and progress. They include a nonfiction exploration of the laws governing spousal consent, a work of fiction about the complicated relationships among women in a family, and the life story of Canada’s foremost feminist novelist.

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

This memoir from the Canadian author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” spans almost 600 pages and “more than most literary memoirs, is a vessel of wrath,” said Dwight Garner at The New York Times. Luckily, “wrath is interesting.”

The book covers everything from Atwood’s upbringing to her relationship with longtime partner Graeme Gibson to her intense connection with both the natural world and her own dark side. It also delves into the life-altering publication of Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid's Tale” (1985), which also became a hit TV series, about a dystopian America in which women are owned and used as breeding chattel. The acclaimed book “consolidated her power as a writer and drew a line under her deep-seated interests in gender, patriarchy and power.” (out now, $35, Amazon; Doubleday)

‘Cursed Daughters’ by Oyinkan Braithwaite

This is the second novel from Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose first book, “My Sister, the Serial Killer” (2018), was a “taut debut about sisterhood, jealousy and murder,” said Chelsea Leu at The Guardian. “Cursed Daughters” similarly deals in familial discord and female rivalry, following a young woman named Eniiyi who is suspected of being the reincarnation of her dead cousin and who must also contend with an alleged generational curse that leaves women in the Falodun family abandoned.

As with her first novel, Braithwaite’s second shares a “lingering fascination with the dark secrets that might bind the women of a family together,” said Leu, although the “true family curse may just be these women’s inability to reckon with their past.” (out now, $29, Amazon; Doubleday)

‘Some Bright Nowhere’ by Ann Packer

Ann Packer's first work in a decade was recently announced as Oprah's 120th book club pick. The novel tells the story of a long-married couple who are preparing to part eternally as one of them succumbs to a terminal illness; in addition, the wife has requested that her best friends, instead of her husband, care for her during the final weeks of her life.

The book will spark discussion about the “obligations of marriage and the difference between male and female friendships,” said Oprah to Oprah Daily. It also asks among the “most significant of questions: How do you want to spend your last days?” (out now, $23, Amazon; HarperCollins)

‘The White Hot’ by Quiara Alegría Hudes

The debut novel from memoirist and Pulitzer-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (“In the Heights”) takes its name “from waves of all-consuming rage,” said Joumana Khatib at The New York Times Book Review. April, a young mother raising her daughter Noelle in a high-stress intergenerational environment, finds herself spiraling with an anger she refers to as ‘the white hot,’ an inner voice that eventually tells her to simply leave her life behind as an act of self-preservation.

So April gets on a bus and goes. The novel takes the form of a letter that April leaves Noelle to explain her absence. “Mothers who leave their children are the third rail of splintered family narratives, and ‘The White Hot’ has the effect of pressing your hand to a barbed live wire,” said Khatib. (out now, $26, Amazon; One World)

‘Without Consent’ by Sarah Weinman

“Without Consent” chronicles the long legal battle to make marital rape a crime in the United States, starting with the country’s first trial of its kind back in 1978. Although women’s rights have expanded and improved in many ways over the last 50 years, Weinman’s book “points out” that “progress against a patriarchal and often misogynistic system has been agonizingly slow,” said Kate Tuttle at The Boston Globe.

“I was shocked how little, overall, has been written about spousal rape and the specific case, Oregon v. Rideout, at the book’s heart — that has become all too timely today,” said Weinman on social media. There is still no federal law against marital rape, and there are “numerous exceptions and qualifications needed in many states to prove such assaults occurred,” said Rachel Louise Snyder at The New York Times. (out now, $32, Amazon; Ecco)

In a career of great breadth – from a deputy governor in Iraq to Harvard professor and now successful podcaster – Rory Stewart’s latest book represents “one of his quieter triumphs”, said Patrick Galbraith in Literary Review. But it’s “a triumph nonetheless”. It collects the fortnightly columns he wrote for the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald during his nine years as MP for Penrith and The Border. Despite often being “produced in the dead of night (sometimes in the bath)”, the pieces are “very good indeed” – and show how genuinely Stewart cared about this “half-forgotten part of Britain”.

Most MPs who write columns for local newspapers produce only “turgidly self-serving accounts”, said Jamie Blackett in The Daily Telegraph. Not Stewart, whose writings are affecting and wide-ranging. Descriptions of walks across the “fells and valleys” mingle with historical reflections – on the death of Edward I, who developed dysentery after drinking Cumbrian water. And while there are detours into the nitty-gritty of Stewart’s life as an MP – he describes agonising with constituents over a proposed scheme to build wind turbines, and trying to keep an agricultural college open – the overall tone is “one of curious detachment from the political process”.

As a writer, Stewart has long been able to bring “intelligence and panache” to almost any subject, said David Robinson in The Scotsman. That is why, even if you’re unfamiliar with this slice of Cumbria, the pieces in Middleland “stand up surprisingly well”. What they don’t do is make being an MP sound appealing: Stewart describes having to reply to 20,000 emails each year, and having “no real power, though everyone thinks otherwise”. Being an MP, he concludes, is an “impossible job” – which is why he has left frontline politics behind him.

‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ by Beth Macy

Beth Macy’s characterization of life today in her Ohio birthplace “might feel familiar, like an update of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy,” said Alex Kotlowitz in The Atlantic. In fact, the vice president grew up an hour down the road. “But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents,” Macy returned to Urbana, Ohio, an economically distressed city of 11,000, eager to listen to and learn from her former neighbors about why so many friends no longer talk to one another and why so many embrace the politics of Donald Trump. In Paper Girl, her new hybrid of memoir and social portrait, the Roanoke, Va.–based author of Dopesick and Factory Man “does what most opinion essays don’t even try to do: She gets out of her bubble.” And one of her most striking discoveries is how lonely many Americans are.

Our culture divide won’t be erased anytime soon, said Leigh Haber in The Washington Post. But “in offering us a chair at her kitchen table, Macy has injected a rare note of civility into the conversation.” Macy herself grew up poor; she was the daughter of the town drunk. After a newspaper route earned her pocket money, a Pell Grant enabled her to earn a college degree, and while she never cut all ties to Urbana, she was startled to discover upon her return that a place once proud to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad had shifted from Republican-­leaning to deep red, with QAnon lies metastasizing and Confederate flags flying. Macy traces the discontent back decades and calls on various experts to help fill in the big picture of job losses and failing public institutions. The result is a “searingly poignant” book that’s not afraid to call out liberals for being so blind to red-state pain.

“The conversations Macy has in this book—both with her family and others in MAGA world—are fascinating, but never entirely fruitful,” said Grace Byron in The New Yorker. She fares better when focused on her book’s true star: Silas, a young trans man working against the odds to move up in the world. Silas’ inclusion “could come across as a cynical ploy,” an easy way for Macy to highlight small-town intolerance. But Silas mostly illustrates how much more challenging life has become for Urbana’s ambitious young adults. Meanwhile, Macy blames Trump for the political polarization she sees, which feels too easy. Her “more compelling argument” is that America’s middle class is being crushed by the nation’s ultrarich. Since Trump’s 2016 election, many books have attempted to explain the nation’s deep divide. “Few do so as deftly as Macy’s.”

‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’ by Stefan Fatsis

“Are dictionaries going the way of dodos, pocket calculators, and civil discourse?” asked Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Sure, dictionaries are still printed. But the information they specialize in has largely moved online, and Stefan Fatsis’ lively new history of the once-ubiquitous reference books includes an insider account of the collapse of Merriam-Webster’s most recent bid to print an updated unabridged volume. While Word Freak, Fatsis’ previous book, proved gripping because it built to a Scrabble championship showdown, “Unabridged does not have that kind of narrative spine.” It’s instead the kind of book “enjoyed by dipping in and out of its discrete chapters,” whether Fatsis is focused on how social media is changing English or forecasting how AI may change how we view dictionaries.

The book “abounds with curious particulars,” said Henry Hitchings in The Wall Street Journal. Fatsis amusingly relates how Noah Webster strove to modernize English spelling when he created America’s first dictionary in 1806, only to be laughed at for suggestions such as “soop” and “spunge.” Insults were also flung at Merriam-­­Webster in 1961 when its unabridged Third New International edition included an entry for “ain’t.” That was the book primed for a revision when Fatsis landed work as a trainee lexicographer at Merriam-­Webster’s Springield, Mass., headquarters. While he’s often sardonic, his book is also “a stout defense of the craft of making dictionaries.”

Fatsis’ best passages detail office life at Merriam-­Webster, said Dan Piepenbring in The New York Times. We’re there both for a retiree’s wistful send-off and a debate over a risqué definition of Dutch oven. At times, the book feels “like a Frederick Wiseman documentary about the last days of lexicography,” which I wanted more of. But Unabridged also provides “an excellent primer on Merriam-­Webster’s role in the culture wars, with thorough accounts of the dictionary’s approach to the N-word, the F-word, ‘Covid-19,’ and ‘woke.’” In the end, Merriam’s place in our national life comes across as privileged but tenuous. “We ask the dictionary to serve as both the authoritarian father and the laid-back uncle, but we bridle if it settles too comfortably into either role.”

David Szalay’s “Flesh” is “almost certainly the most monosyllabic Booker prizewinner ever”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. The brooding protagonist, István, largely speaks in “gruff, gruntish ‘yeahs’, ‘nos’ and ‘okays’”, giving the book the “terse narrative style of a thriller”.

It is also perhaps the “blokiest winner” in the literary award’s history, exploring masculinity in a way that will likely appeal to that “elusive creature, the 21st-century male reader of novels”.

‘Timely anxieties’

“This year’s shortlist was a strong one”, said Martin Chilton in The Independent. Each of the “experienced” authors tackled the “theme of identity” in one way or another – but none managed it more “compellingly” than Szalay, whose “urgent and honest 349-page novel taps into timely anxieties about manhood”.

The tale begins in Hungary, where 15-year-old István is living with his mother in a block of flats. Emotionally detached and struggling to fit in, he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait before moving to London where he works first as a bouncer and then as a driver for the super-rich.

Covering a wide range of themes from teenage sex to infidelity, “everyday struggles” to murder, each chapter is “almost a self-contained unit”. Szalay writes with a “terse precision”, in a prose that is “pared to the bone” yet “deeply affecting”. What makes the book “so hypnotic” is his ability to bring his “introverted” protagonist to life, examining “profound questions about what drives an existence”, and “what sometimes shatters it”.

A novel that deserves “more than one encounter”, it’s a “startling, heartbreaking read”. The “most deserved Booker winner” since Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain” in 2020, it was the “right choice” by this year’s judges.

Cutting us off from István’s thoughts and emotions is a “risky strategy” said Justine Jordan in The Guardian, but the “narrative flatness hugely pays off”. The “yawning gaps” in the text draw us in, encouraging us to “solve the puzzle” of the protagonist. A “propulsive page-turner”, its “originality makes it a novel you will think about as well as feel, like a gut punch, in your body”.

‘Decent’ enough

“I’d wager” that many commentators will love “Flesh”, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Telegraph. “They’re all wrong.” Szalay’s novel is “decent” enough – “but it wasn’t the best book on the shortlist. That was Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, closely followed by Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land in Winter’”. Their prose is “wholly engrossing”, whereas Szalay “didn’t impress me so much”.

His winning tale “wasn’t half the book it could have been”. István’s thoughts are “framed plainly and clearly” and the novel “almost found a second gear that would have tempered the numbness, the aridity. Frustratingly, it never quite did.” Szalay’s winning book will receive much praise, but as a reader nothing beats being “electrified by good prose”. Roddy Doyle, chair of this year’s Booker jury, said “Flesh” was “not like any other book”. “It would be nice if that were true.”

“Is ‘Flesh’ the best of the shortlist?” said Thomas-Corr in The Times. Right from the opening pages it “ensnared me”, and “I’ve been raving about Szalay’s clean, elegant prose ever since”. I admit, though, I have a “soft spot” for Andrew Miller, “one of Britain’s most underrated novelists”. Still, I expect “Flesh” will be a “commercial hit”, and should finally park the “hoary old claim that the male novelist stands no chance of success any more”.

Today, it is easy to forget how “brutal and random” the 1970s could be, said Hugh Thomson in The Spectator. This was the first age of transnational terrorism, when radicals and revolutionaries deployed new, often deadly tactics in the hope of furthering their goals. They carried out plane hijackings, kidnappings and massacres – from the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 – and set off bombs around the globe, “from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore”.

In this “superb and monumental” book, Jason Burke details the main movements – including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and “our own IRA” – and offers “sharp vignettes of the principal combatants”, among them Leila Khaled, the Palestinian “Grenade Girl” (who helped hijack planes in 1969 and 1970), and the “extraordinary” Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan terrorist-for-hire. Burke, a foreign correspondent for nearly 30 years, “brings a wealth of experience” to his tale, which is “epic”, lively and well written.

Many of the terrorists of the early 1970s were over-educated “countercultural types”, said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. “The German women of the Red Army Faction mixed dialectical materialism with topless sunbathing in Amman, to the chagrin of their Palestinian hosts.” Kozo Okamoto, of the Japanese Red Army, was an eccentric, cherry blossom-obsessed Marxist. But as Burke shows, a “marked shift” took place in the late 1970s, when such “secular, left-leaning” figures gave way to Islamist extremists, said Richard Vinen in Literary Review. The new terrorists who emerged “felt nothing in common with the European Left”, “placed little value on their own lives”, and embraced ever-more extreme tactics, including, eventually, suicide bombings.

The one flaw of this otherwise “magisterial” book is Burke’s failure to define precisely what “revolutionists” are, said Barney Horner in The New Statesman. “This becomes a problem with the chapters, fascinating though they are, on Israeli state terrorism”: Mossad’s “excursions across western Europe and North Africa” are hard to depict as the “labours of revolutionary struggle”. Burke could also have devoted more space to the “power plays within Palestinian factions”, said Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Times. Still, for the most part this book is a “fascinating chronicle of lethal Middle Eastern conspirators and absurd Western killers”. I found it “unputdownable”.

The politician and former chancellor chooses five favourite books. He will be speaking about his book “Can We Be Great Again?” at the St Andrew’s Book Festival in London on 25 November.

Peak Human

Johan Norberg, 2025

If you’re worried that Western civilisation and democracy is in decline, this is for you – in fact, it’s the best book I have read this year. Johan Norberg looks at civilisations from Athens to the Anglosphere, and traces the reasons for their rise and fall. His conclusion: all is not lost.

Super Agers

Eric Topol, 2025

Eric Topol is my favourite American doctor, and has given me superb advice on many occasions. His latest book looks scientifically at all the diseases that cause ageing, from heart disease to cancer to dementia – and exactly what the latest clinical trials say works and does not work. For someone like me who is turning 60 next year, it was unputdownable!

Broken Threads

Mishal Husain, 2024

Not every broadcaster can write – but Mishal Husain certainly can. This is a beautiful account of the impact of partition in India on both branches of her family, setting their painstakingly researched stories against the backdrop of deep historical currents.

How Countries Go Broke

Ray Dalio, 2025

A book about something no one wants to talk about, but should: our looming debt crisis. In surprisingly readable prose, Ray Dalio explains why we should all be terrified of what is around the corner. As someone who has made his billions building up the world’s largest hedge fund, he knows his stuff.

The Optimist

Keach Hagey, 2025

Finally, a book on the forthcoming AI revolution. A biography of Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, the company that gave us ChatGPT, which has become something of an addiction for me (try asking it your life expectancy). Worth reading for a window on where we are going, through the eyes of one of the most powerful people in the world.

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop

‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ by Paul Kingsnorth

“Paul Kingsnorth tends to think in the most sweeping terms imaginable,” said Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Times. In Against the Machine, his recent best seller, the British novelist, poet, and essayist urges us all to rediscover our humanity before “the Machine” fully exterminates it. And by “the Machine,” he means a belief system born during the Enlightenment that glorifies technological progress and has induced the people of the West to gradually cede power over their lives to government, corporations, and other large institutions. Kingsnorth has spread these ideas via his Substack, said Justin Ariel Bailey in Christianity Today, and he has now consolidated his missives into “a trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology’s promise of power and autonomy.”

“Kingsnorth is a fascinating man,” said Corbin K. Barthold in City Journal. In his youth, he was an eco-activist who chained himself to bulldozers, and by his early 40s he was both an accomplished novelist and one of the U.K.’s leading environmentalists. But he lost faith in the green movement, and in 2014 he and his wife decamped to rural Ireland, where they homeschool their children and grow much of their food. Eventually, he joined the Eastern Orthodox Christian church. “Kingsnorth is a gifted stylist and a syncretic thinker,” and his ideas, at their best, are “sharp and layered.” In this “engrossing but often vexing” book, unfortunately, he “rests his boldest claims on little more than vibes.” He romanticizes the rural life of past centuries, ignoring its hardships, while his distrust of economic data “leaves his treatise fatally incomplete.”

Still, “the deeper provocations of Against the Machine are worth hearing, however gloomy,” said Cal Revely-Calder in The New Yorker. “Kingsnorth is surely right that public life has been overtaken by a narrow fixation on data and measurement” and that technologies of convenience are robbing us of skills, such as cooking, that were once foundational to the human experience. He tells us that the Machine has severed our ties to the four anchors of prior human cultures: people, place, prayer, and the past. But he has no concrete recommendations on how to fight the Machine beyond walking away from it—or at least limiting our participation in its growing omnipotence—while seeking to support small communities built upon older values. Even Kingsnorth, however, had to access the internet and work at a laptop to produce his book. In short, “we can’t walk away when there is no ‘away.’”

‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’ by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

“Given its punishing nature, why read this book?” asked Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide at 41 earlier this year, went public years ago with her allegations of being raped as a 16-year-old by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and subsequently being trafficked by the pair to Britain’s Prince Andrew and other powerful men. (Andrew, for his part, denies any sexual contact with Giuffre.) “But while the book is relentlessly, shockingly hard, it is also a clear-eyed and necessary account of how sex offenders operate.” The deft narrative constructed by Giuffre and a co-­writer “does what deposition can’t by taking us into the room with her.” And though it adds only one figure to the list of men Epstein allegedly trafficked underage girls to—an unnamed former prime minister—it does make Maxwell, the deceased Epstein’s accomplice, look entirely undeserving of clemency.

It’s also “the saddest story I’ve read in years,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Giuffre describes being sexually abused throughout her childhood, beginning at age 7, allegedly at the hands of her father and a friend of his, both of whom eventually raped her. (Her father denies her accusations against him.) Giuffre says she later was raped in a car by two teenagers and by a stranger who picked her up when she ran away from a juvenile detention center. She was thus a vulnerable target at 16 when she landed a job at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., resort and was quickly lured by Maxwell into Epstein’s twisted world. While “it will take years to unfurl the tentacles Epstein wrapped around finance, law, and politics,” Nobody’s Girl “floats free, self-­assured and self-­­contained—a true American tragedy.”

Some of Giuffre’s testimony here “feels unsatisfyingly neat,” said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph (U.K.). She oddly claims, for example, that the famous snapshot showing Prince Andrew and her together on the night of their alleged first sexual encounter was taken because she wanted to share the moment with her mother. Still, “the story is deeper and darker than this book can say,” because even Giuffre feared naming all accomplices she knew of. For standing up to Epstein, she “doesn’t deserve our scrutiny so much as our admiration.”