By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place, and “ou-topos”, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both.

In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic (“we should neutralise the poets’ influence on mothers”). Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where “nothing is private”, and so “the common affairs be earnestly looked upon”. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war.

Some patterns emerge: many utopias employ a framing device in which the narrator is accidentally or fantastically transported to a new land, and then subjected to reams of expository monologue about how it all works. Families are often abolished, with children raised in common. And in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, Wren explains straightfacedly, “there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here as in most utopias”.

Families are allowed, though, in Voyage en Icarie, by the 19th-century French socialist Étienne Cabet, which envisions a sternly regimented communism. In 1849 Cabet founded his own model society, Icaria, in Illinois. Alas, after a few years, “Cabet’s citizens were hoarding possessions; they indulged in vices including hunting and fishing, swearing, tobacco and alcohol; the women wore makeup, jewellery and perfume.” Cabet’s solution to this disgraceful state of affairs was to insist on even stricter rules, and to make himself president “for four years instead of one”. Just so does utopia always threaten to turn into dictatorship.

It is odd, then, that Wren never mentions a famous reckoning with the concept of utopia. In 1974, the American political philosopher Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argues that the only morally permissible state is a “minimal” one that guarantees property rights and security, and enforces contracts. People should be free to build whatever forms of association they like on top of that, as long as membership is never coerced. But for Nozick utopias are always coercive because not everyone will agree freely with their values. “It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it,” Nozick writes. “Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”

Many features of the utopias in Wren’s splendid catalogue, after all, are rather sad. In Gilman’s Moving the Mountain, “There are almost no pets, as they’re wasteful.” In Voyage en Icarie, “The decorative prints are full of useful information, as opposed to pointless landscape paintings.” HG Wells’s A Modern Utopia of 1905 describes an elite “samurai” class, his society’s natural nobility, who “must not act or sing … they can’t play or watch competitive sport.”

But inasmuch as utopias are primarily “organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought”, Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some indeed have been science fiction. He mentions here the 1970s “anarchist utopia” of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but probably the most popular strain of utopian fiction over the last few decades has been the epic series of Culture novels by Iain M Banks, which posits fully automated luxury communism in space among a pan-galactic society of augmented humans.

Still, things regularly go awry in this ideal society, from attack by intolerant fanatics, to rogue AI utilitarianism, or unfeasibly ancient alien artefacts. The best utopian fiction therefore ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself.

The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

One of the questions Candice Carty-Williams has spent the past few years batting away is whether she is Queenie. It is perhaps inevitable: her best­selling debut novel followed Queenie Jenkins, a twenty­something south London journalist navigating heartbreak, racism, terrible men and an escalating sense that her life was slipping beyond her control. Like Carty-Williams, Queenie is south London-born, Black and works in media.

It is a slightly predictable question, and one I avoid asking when we meet at her bright pink office in Peckham. But sitting opposite the 36-year-old, I can’t help but understand why it persists. Much like her most famous creation, she is instantly likable: warm, quick-witted and completely devoid of the self-seriousness that can sometimes come with literary success. She is disarmingly casual – her hair is wrapped up and under-eye patches are busy depuffing her face.

“I find Queenie quite annoying actually,” Carty-Williams laughs, putting to bed the allegations before I get the chance to ask. “I think a lot of people do. But I quite like that.”

It has been seven years since Queenie exploded on to the British publishing scene. Released in 2019, the novel arrived carrying the tagline “the Black Bridget Jones” – a phrase coined by Carty-Williams herself. At the time, she was working in marketing at a publishing house and understood better than most how difficult it could be to make a novel by a Black woman cut through.

It worked beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Queenie became a phenomenon: it sold more than half a million copies, won book of the year at the British book awards in 2020 – making Carty-Williams the first Black writer ever to win – and was adapted for television by Channel 4.

If there is any secret to its success, Carty-Williams thinks it lies in relatability. “I think she’s just a drama queen,” she says. “And people are very interested in that.”

Nine years after first signing her book deal, Carty-Williams is returning to Queenie with a sequel. The new novel revisits its heroine in her early 30s, older and supposedly wiser, though still very much capable of detonating her own life. She is trapped in a situationship with a noncommittal guy she refers to as “TFL man”, so named because he is one of the tube network’s “fiiiine” employees, while also trying to rekindle things with Frank, the love of her life. The familiar ensemble of friends – “the Corgis” – also return. At work, she is investigating Black maternal healthcare, only to discover troubling information about her own fertility.

For a long time, Carty-Williams resisted writing a sequel. “When I first signed my book deal in 2017, my editor said, ‘We’ll do a two-book deal for you,’” she tells me. “But I didn’t want to do a sequel right away, because I think people would expect it. My editor told me I should flex a little bit and try something else.”

Instead, she wrote People Person, her 2022 novel about a sprawling family of half-siblings and their wayward Jamaican patriarch. “That was fun,” she says. “But I did rewrite it twice because I’m not very good at landing on things.”

Returning to Queenie only made sense for Carty-Williams if she could find a story that “blows her life up again”. But, she says, because “a lot of Black women read her, I had to be careful about what I’m putting her through, because I’m putting them through it too. People feel very attached to her. So I was like, ‘Let’s come back when she’s in her 30s.’”

One of the triumphs of Queenie was that it refused a politics of Black exceptionalism. Queenie is not polished, nor noble or aspirational. She makes bad choices repeatedly, has terrible sex, and sends regrettable messages. She is self-sabotaging and self-involved. Readers either adore her or cannot stand her. The same traits are true of Queenie 2.0, and Carty-Williams seems delighted by both reactions.

“I like having fun with my readers,” she says. “And I don’t want to write boring people – you’re alone writing a novel for years. You need to entertain yourself.

“No one has it all together,” she continues. “I don’t, and I’m 36. I’m OK to go on the journey with her.”

The book also tackles motherhood and Black maternal healthcare head on. Interestingly, while Queenie longs for motherhood, Carty-Williams increasingly suspects she does not want children herself. “I think in my 20s I assumed I would,” she says. Laughing, she adds: “Now? I just don’t think I can be bothered.”

Marriage, similarly, while a north star for Queenie, holds little appeal. “It would feel like a trap,” she says insouciantly. “I like being a singular person.”

The themes in the book were partly sparked by Carty-Williams’s own experiences undergoing fertility testing after a time of prolonged stress during which she had her period for weeks. Everything was fine, she says, but the doctors immediately began discussing IVF and egg freezing. “And I was like: whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t even know if I want children.”

Researching Black maternal healthcare for the novel proved both shocking and infuriating. She mentions the campaign group Five X More, named after the 2019 statistic that Black women in the UK were five times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or the postnatal period than white women (the gap has narrowed since then, but there is still a nearly threefold disparity).

In the course of her investigation, Queenie encounters a Black woman who is told she is “big and strong” and can “handle the pain”, even as she is losing a worrying amount of blood; another whose midwife attributes a difficult labour to her “African pelvis”; and a third who is denied pain relief because there is supposedly no gas and air available on the ward, despite watching other women receive it.

“When Queenie’s researching in the book, that’s basically my research,” Carty-Williams says. “I put it in almost verbatim because I was so astounded. There’s basically no training around women of different backgrounds,” she continues. “A lot of this stuff is avoidable.”

Carty-Williams grew up in south London, her childhood defined by constant movement. “We were just renting and in council houses constantly,” she tells me. “I’ve lived in, like, 20 houses.”

Her mother is of Jamaican–Indian heritage, while her Jamaican father arrived in Britain at 16 and worked as a taxi driver. He met her mother when he picked her up from shifts as a hospital receptionist. It later emerged he already had three children with a different woman. Books were few and far between at home. “But I lived in the school library,” she says. “I’d read, like, a book a day.” Her mother, who is dyslexic and dyspraxic, stopped reading aloud to her when she was very young. “Then I just took over,” she says. “I became obsessed.”

Writing, however, did not initially feel like a viable future. “I wanted to do English literature at university, but teachers told me I wouldn’t get the grades,” she says. “They suggested media studies instead.” In the end she achieved two As and a B. “They predicted me three Cs,” she says. “I was in all the lower sets because I talked too much. Apparently, I had behavioural issues. A lot of it was that I was just bored.”

After getting in touch with a friend of a friend who worked in publishing, she secured an internship at a Brixton publisher, and eventually a role in the marketing department at 4th Estate. It was there, in her early 20s, that she first began to understand the shape of the industry – and to notice what was missing.

“I was, like: there isn’t anything written by anyone like me,” she says. That frustration would eventually become the 4thWrite prize, a scheme for unpublished Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers run in collaboration with the Guardian. “The prize is one of my babies,” she says. “Everyone was really receptive to it. But I also recognised things weren’t moving fast enough,” she continues. “So I was, like: OK, I’ll just write the book myself.”

In 2024, five years after the publication of Queenie, it made the leap from page to screen. The Channel 4 adaptation arrived amid considerable excitement. When I ask Carty-Williams what it was like to be showrunner and lead writer on the series, she pauses. “I’m trying to think of the best way to talk about this,” she says. “Because I’ll get in trouble.” Another pause. “It was probably the worst professional experience of my life,” she says eventually. “I tried to quit three times. And because of that, I don’t want to develop anything for the screen ever again.”

It should have been a dream scenario: as soon as the novel became a bestseller, television companies began jostling to make it. Carty-Williams met about 13 production companies before choosing one to adapt it. It was the kind of success story debut writers fantasise about. “I guess what I thought development would be …” she says carefully, “… did not come to fruition.”

Carty-Williams felt that her novel was constantly being second-guessed, and the subtlety of the Black experience reduced to crude stereotypes. At one meeting, she recalls, someone suggested opening the show with a white character using the N-word within the first five minutes “to really grab people”. “I was, like, this shit ain’t for me,” she says. “That’s not the story I’m telling.”

“I love collaboration,” she continues. “But when people who do not look like you are questioning a character who looks like you, it feels bizarre … you feel crazy.”

The irony is difficult to miss. Queenie became a literary phenomenon precisely because readers recognised something truthful in its depiction of a young Black British woman. Yet in the process of adapting it, Carty-Williams often found herself defending that truth against people who seemed to fundamentally mistrust it.

The toll was severe. “It made me really physically sick … really paranoid,” she says. But by the time production started, she felt unable to walk away. “There were so many people’s jobs on the line,” she explains. “I remember thinking, you’ve just got to take this one on the chin.”

The adaptation ultimately received mixed reviews. Some critics praised its performances and emotional ambition; others were less convinced. A Guardian review described the series as “strangely preoccupied with whiteness”, with depictions of Black womanhood “so basic that it is hard to imagine Black female audiences being impressed by its insights” – criticism that lands differently after hearing Carty-Williams describe the development process.

Was she happy with the finished result? “No,” she answers immediately. However, she is quick not to render the whole experience a total write-off. “I worked with some incredible people,” she tells me. “I would work with them again, but a lot of it was just difficult and painful.”

The experience also left her thinking more broadly about the industry that produced the book, the echoes of which are reflected in the sequel.

The publishing landscape Queenie entered in 2019 feels very different from the one that exists now. In the aftermath of Queenie’s success and the subsequent racial reckoning of 2020 – “black square summer”, as Carty-Williams dubs it sardonically after the Black Lives Matter social media “black out” – publishers were suddenly scrambling to acquire novels by Black writers to display their diversity credentials. “There was definitely a wave,” she says. “[After Queenie came out] people were literally pitching books by saying: ‘We’re going to market this like Queenie.’”

In the sequel, Queenie faces media types who indulge in the sort of aggressively meaningless diversity language familiar to any person of colour who has worked in a corporate office. “It was inspired by what I’ve gone through,” she says. “People saying things to my face like: ‘We need an urban injection’; ‘We need something Black-facing.’ What does that even mean?” Now, she says, much of the institutional enthusiasm for opening up the creative industries has evaporated. “All the diversity schemes disappeared,” she says. “Because organisations realised people would get annoyed about them.”

The impact of Queenie on Carty-Williams’s own life was perhaps more profound than it was on the publishing industry. She bought a house, something that still feels like a huge milestone after her peripatetic childhood. The novel also ushered in a level of stability that is less visible but, she suggests, just as significant. “Honestly, my biggest expenditure is therapy,” she says. “That’s the biggest luxury.” She has little interest in literary celebrity. “I don’t go on holiday a lot; I work a lot,” she says. “I like a quiet life.”

So what comes next? There are, she says, other forms she wants to try. A book of essays, for one – but not yet. “Can I do it in my 40s?” she asks, laughing. “I feel like I’ll have lived a bit more then.” For now, she is circling ideas for her next novel, including one that feels distinctly of this moment: parasocial relationships, the strange intimacy between public figures and their audience.

Longer term, she talks about returning to publishing as her “end goal” – though not in the way she once knew it, with all the emotional labour that often accompanies conversations about representation. “I’ve done a lot of the work,” she says, matter-of-factly. “And I’m tired of it. It’s a lot for one person to do. I’d want to go in there and be able to enjoy my work, but also to keep representing and make sure that good things are published.”

And Queenie? Will we see a return to the character who changed everything? She pauses and smiles. “Yeah, I have to,” she says. “I don’t know when that will be.” She leans back slightly, as if testing the idea aloud. “I’d like to because I’ll miss her and I’ll miss everyone. There are still things to work out – Queenie and Frank’s status, Kyazike, Cassandra.

“But again,” she adds, “we have to have something to blow her life up.”

The prominent literary magazine Granta will no longer publish the winning entries of the annual Commonwealth short story prize after one of this year’s winners drew widespread accusations of AI use.

The magazine said it would no longer be involved in “external publishing partnerships” in which it had no editorial control.

In a statement to the Guardian, Granta said: “The 2026 selection of the regional winners of the Commonwealth prize caused a great deal of controversy, based on the speculation that one or more of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated, accusations that were strongly rejected by the authors.

“For the sake of our own editorial integrity, the Granta Trust board has now taken the decision that we will no longer engage in external publishing partnerships. We will keep the Commonwealth prize shortlisted stories on our website in the public interest, and wish our former partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its work.”

This year’s winning story from the Caribbean region, The Serpent in the Grove by Jamir Nazir, began to draw attention on X and Bluesky in mid-May, when critics claimed the story had “obvious markers” of AI-generated writing.

The story features items arranged in threes and “not x, but y” constructions, which some regard as a sign of AI use. Critics also highlighted phrases such as “Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument” and “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men”.

“My writing process is unusual”, Nazir told the Observer via email in late May. “It is conducted entirely on an Android phone. This is a necessity driven by chronic health conditions which make sustained, desk-bound typing physically impossible. That is why I rely on speech-to-text to do my writing, followed by minimal keyboard editing, along with the same process of speech-to-text. I have used this in my professional life and also to produce my story for the Commonwealth competition.”

The Granta publisher and philanthropist Sigrid Rausing released a statement on 19 May in response to the controversy: “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”

The same day, the Commonwealth Foundation director general, Razmi Farook, said: “All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the foundation has confirmed this.”

The prize awards £5,000 to an overall winner and £2,500 to regional winners. According to the Sigrid Rausing Trust website, the trust awarded £30,000 to the Commonwealth short story prize between 2014 and 2016.

The Commonwealth prize did not respond to a request for comment.

Dear BookBrowsers,

This issue has those big new releases you’ve been waiting for. Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say follows Artie Dam, a secretly unhappy man living a charmed life. In Douglas Stuart’s John of John, John-Calum (Cal) Macleod, a closeted art school graduate, reluctantly returns to his family’s rural, conservative home.

We also cover Harriet Clark’s captivating debut The Hill, loosely based on the author’s own experiences growing up while visiting a parent in prison. A Beyond the Book article looks at the role of Clark’s mother, a member of the guerrilla organization the Weather Underground, in the 1981 Brink’s truck robbery in Nanuet, New York. (One of our featured First Impressions picks, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn—an upcoming Ask the Author interviewee—provides a nonfictional glimpse of a childhood with parents who were leaders of the Weather Underground.)

Other exciting fiction includes Mothers and Other Strangers by Corey Ann Haydu, a deep examination of motherhood and friendship, George Saunders’ latest novel Vigil, in which an oil tycoon on his deathbed is tended to by a ghost, Portia Elan’s Homebound, an unusual story featuring characters across time that is also a surprising piece of multimedia art, and Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation of Ananda Devi’s All Flesh, a stunningly brutal tale of adolescence that casts a critical eye on societal fatphobia and social media culture. Our related reading list explores more significant Mauritian fiction available in English.

And Lindy West’s memoir Adult Braces offers readers the chance to tag along on a hilarious, life-changing cross-country roadtrip.

Plus, find additional reviews and articles, previews of May books, the latest book club discussions, and more.

Thanks for being a BookBrowse member!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of the modern age (the book’s first few stories, of 17th-century men and women having to prove they were disabled enough to receive parish support to avoid starvation, will be familiar to anyone who has tried to claim the personal independence payment). And second, that absolutely everything has changed – from the closing of asylums to the advent of prosthetics to the eventual, belated enshrining of disability rights in law.

But the central argument of Disability helps to reconcile these two narratives into a coherent whole. Turner, a professor at Swansea University, shows that while public and political attitudes to disability have remained poor, disabled people have challenged them at every stage, wresting progress out of even the most unpromising circumstances. This is not a story of rights and dignity bestowed from on high, but of the people and communities clawing them into being.

The sweeping perspective is anchored by incredible personal stories. We meet Duncan Campbell, an aristocrat who, at the turn of the 18th century, became a sensation as a deaf psychic, trading on myth and rumour relating to his disability to boost his fame and credibility at a time when deafness was equated with being childlike and ineducable. Or, two centuries later, May Billinghurst, the infamous “cripple suffragette” who used her bespoke hand-operated tricycle to break through police lines and commit acts of civil disobedience. Or, later still, Megan du Boisson, a 1960s housewife who campaigned for the first disability benefits awarded solely on the basis of impairment, when existing schemes only covered those injured at work or in war, leaving out almost all disabled women.

What they, alongside many others in the book, have in common is that they not only resisted the material limitations society imposed on them, but also rejected the assumptions that went with them. The cumulative picture is therefore not of a downtrodden minority but one defined by ingenuity, determination and grit. This may be a new perspective for many nondisabled readers, but members of the community will find themselves recognising the attributes of they and their friends in people who lived hundreds of years ago. It is welcome to see this understanding of disability so well articulated in a book for a general audience.

One sign of the devaluing of disability activism and history is the fact that none of the personalities in the book are household names. May Billinghurst surely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Pankhursts, and we ought to know that it was Vic Finkelstein, an anti-apartheid activist who applied what he had learned in South Africa to the UK disability rights movement, who first articulated what would become known as the social model of disability in the early 1970s, paving the way for activism that went far beyond calls for better financial support.

We should know, too, the name of 18th-century MP William Hay, whom Turner describes as the first person to write about disability as a personal identity, just as we should know the names of Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth, the punk couple who kickstarted the successful 1980s and 90s campaign for the UK’s first comprehensive disability rights law. All fought loud battles with governments and societies that wanted them to be quiet. Hopefully this book goes some way to giving them the status – and voice – they deserve.

In showing how disabled people throughout history have rejected the narratives foisted upon them, Turner in turn rejects another false narrative: that disabled people are passive recipients of both discrimination and help. This book tells another, truer story: that we have always resisted and always fought to make things better.

The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill, £16.99)
In the eponymous Mumbai apartment block, the immensely rich and those who serve them exist side by side but worlds apart. Fading American actor George Abercrombie, married to superstar Sweety Sahota, finds himself advertising Indian whiskey while his younger wife’s acting career continues its stellar trajectory. Waking on the sofa with a hangover and only hazy memories of the night before, George discovers Sweety stabbed to death in the marital bed and one of his shirts, blood-stained, in the laundry basket. He knows he will be the prime suspect, but not only have Sweety’s phone and laptop disappeared, so has his assistant, Amit … Told from the points of view of George, Amit and Sweety’s put-upon PA Gemma – with Amit and Gemma both having secrets of their own – and laced with dry humour and social commentary, this is a tense, fast-paced tale of class, power and corruption.

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper (Faber, £9.99)
Set in LA, award-winning American novelist Harper’s latest novel is a dark and topical tale. Jake, who livestreams crime scenes to an audience hungry for sensation, is currently tapping into the market for serial killer nostalgia with episodes on the LA Ripper, “up to three victims and counting”. Kara works for Sub Rosa, a concierge service that provides the very rich with whatever they desire, legal or otherwise. And Gibson is a public defence lawyer who reluctantly agrees to act for a wealthy predator who threatens to bring down “the pillars of this whole goddamn town”, including Sub Rosa’s clients, before apparently killing himself in his cell. When Kara’s colleague goes missing and she suspects it’s the work of the Ripper, the three protagonists’ worlds converge. Told in apocalyptic language, there are shades of both James Ellroy and Tom Wolfe in this story of greed in all its forms, played out in an intense, chaotic and thoroughly amoral world.

Murder on the Red River by Marcie R Rendon (Viper, £9.99)
Native American playwright and poet Rendon’s debut novel is set in 1970, on the North Dakota/Minnesota border. Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman, is a farm worker, her evenings spent playing pool for beer money. Her world is one of low expectations, limited opportunities, poverty and alcoholism; a hardscrabble childhood with a series of foster families has made her self-reliant, her only real friend being Sheriff Wheaton, who has tried to look out for her since she was “legally kidnapped” from her mother and siblings. When an Ojibwe man is murdered, she helps to gather intelligence for Wheaton’s investigation, putting herself at risk. Beautifully written, with an appealing central character, this is the first novel in a projected series; Rendon prepares the ground well, focusing as much on the larger, systemic crimes committed against the Native American people, such as the forcible removal of children from their families, as on the individual investigation. More, please.

The Devoted by Catherine Cho (4th Estate, £16.99)
There’s more generational trauma and limited choice in Cho’s Hong Kong-set debut novel, this time among the rich and powerful. As the daughter of a key player in the Triad crime syndicate, the narrator Eunha has her life mapped out for her, but her pampered existence as a “tai tai” (wealthy wife) comes to an end when her young son is kidnapped and, despite his safe recovery, she is judged not fit to look after him any more. It is only when she steps away from her safe haven and takes a job as a nightclub hostess that she starts on the long road to understanding the extent to which not only she, but other family members, have been caught up in the machinations of her father’s criminal world. Told in chapters alternating between present and past, this is a moving story of secrets, betrayal and how women are denied agency: The Godfather, seen through a female eye.

The Repentants by Kate Foster (Mantle, £18.99)
Foster’s fourth historical mystery begins in 1790, in St Monans on the east coast of Scotland, where the Rev Mitchell is determined to keep his flock on the straight and narrow. When Florrie Aitken, the underappreciated wife of important local businessman Jonny, is caught with a lover, she is forced into a humiliating public act of repentance; there she encounters Eliza Wood, similarly punished for failing to attend church. Eliza is one of Jonny’s indentured labourers, with no choice but to work for him – first harvesting sea salt then, when Florrie accompanies Jonny to Iceland where he hopes to expand his operation using British prisoners from the hulk in Reykjavík harbour as labour, as their servant. As Jonny plans revenge on his wife, a bond forms between the two women – both, in their different ways, as captive as the men on the prison ship – who begin to plot their escape. Intelligent, atmospheric 18th-century domestic noir.

Thiel donated a record-setting fifteen million dollars to Vance’s successful 2022 bid for Ohio senator, but his largesse on this score receives no acknowledgment in “Communion,” which portrays the campaign as little more than a lark. “In some ways, my Senate run was a quirky intellectual project: an effort to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy,” Vance writes. “I focused less on abstractions like the GDP and more on the dignity of workers and the jobs they did.” (As senator, Vance voted against the PRO Act, which would have banned “right-to-work” laws and bolstered protections for unionizing workers; part of why he opposed the bill, he told Politico in 2024, was because “it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.”)

The invocation of “explicitly Christian arguments” is one of several instances in “Communion” when Vance’s approach to political campaigning and governance can seem borderline theocratic. One of his everyday challenges as Vice-President is to figure out “how to take an accepted moral principle and apply it in the real world as a Christian leader.” This conflation of public service with puffed-chest religious crusading is especially jarring when he writes, at length, about his 2025 visit to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pope Francis, and his tense interactions with officials there, mainly over U.S. immigration policy. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance recalls, affronted, “and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” He goes on, “I’m one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”

It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio. Or who, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a mother of three during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, condemned the victim as a “deranged leftist” whose death was a “tragedy of her own making.” Or whose career has been largely bankrolled by the co-founder of Palantir, which has a thirty-million-dollar contract with ICE to provide A.I. surveillance and data-mining technology for hunting and deporting immigrants. Or who uses Elon Musk, the tech trillionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency overseer whose cuts to public-health agencies and infrastructure are projected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as an exemplar of how “immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.”

In emphasizing the supposedly Christian or Catholic nature of his leadership, Vance may be nodding to integralism, a loosely federated intellectual movement also known simply as “political Catholicism,” which holds that civil law and governance should subordinate themselves to Catholic doctrine. But, in April, when he admonished Pope Leo to make sure that his theological remarks are “anchored in the truth,” Vance seemed not to understand that a Catholic is obligated to subordinate himself to the Vicar of Christ. “What is striking about his comments, and devastating for integralism, is the breezy impertinence with which he rebukes the Holy Father,” the Scottish writer Stephen Daisley observed in the conservative religious magazine First Things. Vance, Daisley marvelled, “tells the pope not only to keep his nose out of the affairs of the state but that he is in error on Church doctrine. If this is how a postliberal Catholic, and a convert no less, speaks of the pope’s involvement in politics, the prospect of recruiting postliberal Catholic politicians, Republican or Democrat, who will agree to submit American policymaking to the magisterium of the Church is slim in the extreme.”

One suspects that Vance would have a better grasp of Catholic customs and vibes if he spent more time around rank-and-file parishioners in “fraternal sharing and in ecclesial communion,” to borrow Pope Leo’s words. But Vance admits that, about “half the time these days, we attend Mass at home.” (Your book is called “Communion,” my brother!) A surpassingly strange thing about Vance’s book, in fact, is how often he sounds not much like a Christian at all, Catholic or otherwise. “Religious beliefs are less like certainties such as the boiling point of water—which can be verified through testing—and more like claims about complex systems,” Vance writes. “Take, for example, the following: An increase in the minimum wage would raise the standard of living for low-income people.” Raising wages might sound nice, Vance goes on, but it might also “reduce the number of jobs available to low-income people. . . . The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”