There’s a common greeting in the Outer Hebrides: the lineage-establishing “Who do you belong to?” By the time this question is posed to 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, in Douglas Stuart’s new novel, there is a sense that Cal is his father John’s beyond the ordinary claims of blood – the latter’s sway containing undercurrents of domineering ownership.

The book opens with the two conducting a strange ritual over the phone, performed regularly ever since Cal moved to Edinburgh to study textiles: John, a precentor, reads to Cal in Gaelic from the New Testament and has him sing back “with the full power of his belief”. The verse John recites – which prefigures the novel’s themes of repression and self-denial – urges the faithful to guide the errant and to stay vigilant against temptation. After receiving Cal’s assent, John orders him to return home, ostensibly because Cal’s maternal grandmother, Ella, is sick. Though John lives with Ella in her croft house, she is his ex-wife’s mother and thus not his responsibility.

Set within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian community of farmers, weavers and fishers in what appears to be the 1990s, John of John tells the story of Cal’s uneasy homecoming. It’s a reprise of the parable of the prodigal son and an ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence. Intimate yet epic in scale, it contains equal parts pastoral drama, tale of familial fracture, love story and inquiry into various forms of loneliness: the loneliness that can reside between fathers and sons, between lovers, between man and God, and between a small place and the big world.

John disapproves of Cal’s appearance, his sartorial choices and his long, “flame-coloured” hair, disturbed “by the confused signal they were sending, the strange tension between the masculine and the feminine”. Cal’s disinclination to be “saved” creates a rift between them that later erupts in violence. Meanwhile, childhood friend and hookup partner Doll gives Cal the brush-off, cross that he’s been away for so long. Wearied by his ultraconservative environment, where connection feels out of reach, Cal takes a fancy to his dad’s sole friend, confirmed bachelor Innes MacInnes. Cal is struck by Innes’s “gentleness, his benevolence – which Cal had never appreciated before, which, if he were honest, he would have said he found boring, unsexy in younger men”.

This, however, can never be the merry May-December romance Cal wishes it to be. Innes and John are lovers, we learn fairly early on, and it is this pair’s tortured relationship since their teenage years – kept secret from everyone, including Cal – that forms the novel’s centre of gravity. Masters of discretion, John and Innes are, to townsfolk, neighbouring sheep farmers. The first time we see them alone together, at Innes’s, they go through the motions of a long-established routine, allowing themselves to draw close only after John has made sure each room is empty and they are really alone. Later, as John prepares to leave, Innes loudly seeks his assistance over an unspecified “two-man job”, “all in case someone should find out and ask what exactly John Macleod was doing upstairs in the MacInnes house at such an ungodly hour”.

The novel tries their bond in ways small and big. Aside from the difficulty of Cal, there is the matter of John’s other liaison with a married man, and the tenancy of Ella’s house soon to be transferred to Cal’s mother. Innes floats the idea of John moving in with him but intuits “how, even under the threat of homelessness, a life together with him seemed no consolation at all”. John is a man tormented by the idea of his own depravity: “He loved God. He loved Innes. He loved God and God hated how he loved Innes.” At one point he entertains the possibility of Innes, Cal and himself being a family, but even in fantasy, the thought of Cal being gay, like him, remains unimaginable: “They would live like this every day, be useful, peaceful, happy on their land, looking forward to the day Cal married a local girl and filled their croft with grandchildren.”

The novel is outstandingly canny and wrenching on self-contempt, on the toilsome art of deceit, and on the contradictions we all contain, as well as the friction that can exist between the personal and the collective. As secular values gain ground, there is the suggestion that John and Innes living together could deal a death blow to their local congregation, leaving us wondering whether John and Cal will – or can – come out to one another. Amid all this, Stuart finds the space to touch on crofter subservience to absentee landowners, the scorn and prejudice of mainlanders, and the place of the Western Isles within the English imagination.

John of John is certainly enthralling, but the ambient Weltschmerz and the characters’ frequent self-pity can be draining. Stuart’s first two novels, the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain and its follow-up, Young Mungo, were feats of heartfelt, operatic storytelling, composed as though in defiant response to our age of irony and subtlety. Despite their occasionally miserabilist tenor, the emotions felt guileless and real, whether Shuggie’s love for his doomed, alcoholic mother, Agnes; Jodie’s for her brother Mungo; Mungo’s for his birdkeeping neighbour James or his own doomed, alcoholic mother, Maureen. The impoverished Glaswegian milieus where they were set – marked by Thatcherite ruination, homophobia, sexual predation and sectarian strife – made for sobering reading; but these were novels so lavishly and graciously imagined, so very moving, that you gladly faced up to their gloom.

Here Stuart leans heavily on melodrama and sensationalism as a shortcut to tragedy. Towards the end, the novel is eventful to a fault and surfeited with pathos: we have a pregnancy; an attempted shotgun wedding (“What in the world of Thomas Hardy?” says Cal); a death and a momentous departure from the island. While this book will not appeal to those with a low tolerance for excess, diehard romantics will find much to love; I see Cal, John and Innes – knottily entangled and imperfectly endearing – being cherished with readerly devotion. And that is no small feat.

Jem Calder’s writing career had a fairytale start. Sally Rooney emailed him, impressed with a short story he’d submitted to the literary magazine she was editing soon after Conversations with Friends came out. It was the first story he’d ever completed. Calder was already “a huge fan” of Rooney’s, so the whole thing was surreal, he tells me. “I can’t really imagine what could top that, to be honest.”

That story ultimately ended up in Reward System, Calder’s 2022 collection of six interconnected tales following a cast of sad young things living in an unnamed city. It was hailed as a book of the year; a review in this paper placed Calder among “the most talented young writers of fiction at work today”. Now, his debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy, picks up some of the themes of the first book: the trials of modern love, millennial ennui, consumer culture, technology, political and ecological doom. And it’s already got some famous fans: David Szalay has sung its praises, while Andrew O’Hagan says Calder is his “new favourite writer”.

At the novel’s opening, 23-year-old Joey meets 35-year-old Chuck at a bar. They sleep together, and commence what might be described as situationship hell: Joey falls hard, but Chuck isn’t over his ex-fiancee. Joey seems to spend her life waiting for a text back. Like Reward System, the novel is pacy and astute; its 34-year-old author’s bleak appraisal of life for young people today is right on the money. But in both books, the flinty cynicism is offset by a subterranean sense that something better is coming, and the denouements end up being oddly affirming. It helps, too, that Calder is funny.

It soon becomes clear that Joey and Chuck are not singing from the same songsheet. In modern dating parlance, Chuck might be categorised as an “avoidant”: he ditched his fiancee, then regrets it; he likes being around Joey, but doesn’t want to be with her. She “pretty much wants a boyfriend, and he wants someone to take him out of himself”, says Calder.

Chuck feels representative of a sort of endemic commitmentphobia that Calder links to an “unstable and unpleasant” economic reality foisted on his generation. “You can’t afford to own a house, it’s very difficult to have a family” – things that were often “a given in previous relationships”. These constraints “express themselves on the emotional level” as avoidance, or staying in casual relationships rather than settling down. There’s a hedonism to it: because there’s “realistically no actual hope for the future, the younger generation has to content themselves with fucking around”. But this “ends up being a really shallow way to live your life” – a lesson his characters “have to try and get their heads around”.

While the world from Joey’s perspective seems relatively shiny, Chuck is deeply disillusioned. Calder says he is “haunted” by Chuck types – men in their 30s or 40s who have “aged out of being cool”, are suffering from some kind of creative or professional disappointment (perhaps they were in a band and almost-but-not-quite made it) – generally life hasn’t turned out how they’d imagined. “I’m always aware that I’m only one bad draft of a novel away from being in that place,” he says.

Calder grew up in Cambridge, studied English at Leeds, and has since worked a variety of jobs alongside writing, including those of his protagonists – Joey is a barista, and Chuck is a copywriter. He says he “truly can’t relate” to authors who complain of writer’s block – having to work a day job “gives me such motivation to get back to it and force myself to deal with something difficult in my writing”. The novel, which took three years to write, alternates between the points of view of Joey and Chuck. Both write on the side of their day jobs, and the book is partly about two literary types falling in love, swapping Louise Glück and Frank O’Hara poems, showing their work to each other. They are both creatively invigorated by the relationship, something Calder has experienced himself: he began writing the novel in the early stages of dating his girlfriend, meaning he could “transcribe some of literally what was going through my head”.

Chuck and Joey’s power dynamic (he’s older and richer) becomes more interesting as we come to realise that she is the talented one. I Want You to Be Happy is something of an expansion of the opening story in Reward System, in which a young woman, Julia, dates her older colleague. Both Joey and Julia “actually do seem to have some kind of a purpose”, and both men “feel usurped by this younger woman”, says Calder. These dynamics reflect a drama that’s playing out across many professions, including the arts – older men feeling replaced by young, smart women. “It’s really funny to me, people trying to resist something that’s well under way.”

Just before starting to write, Calder binged the works of Elizabeth Taylor. “She’s probably my favourite writer,” he says – with a “cutthroat level of concision that absolutely breaks your heart sometimes, the emotional brutality she can inflict in a couple of lines”. Richard Yates was also a big influence for I Want You to Be Happy.

In the novel, locations are blurry, though Calder slowly leaves clues that we’re in east London (with its attendant weird rental setups – one character lives in a “warehouse conversion with nine housemates and two bathrooms”). Similarly, he drops in consumer brands without naming them – “aspirational-brand handsoap”, a “coral-coloured” debit card – which has a double effect on a reader: it’s satisfying to clock the references (Aesop, Monzo), until you realise that means you’re as brand-brained as Chuck and Joey.

Calder’s characters are addicted to instant gratification – buying stuff, social media, vaping, porn – anything to ward off the world’s horrors (at one point Chuck reads a Guardian article on the climate, which he’d “forgotten to feel anxious about yet today, but now was”). Chuck could be described as an alcoholic, though one of the big questions of the book is what really constitutes addiction, now that addict-like behaviour is so ubiquitous. The “threshold for addiction has almost lowered”, says Calder. It’s “the modern condition, to some extent”. And he’s aware that his readers are afflicted too, that he’s competing for their attention in an “uphill struggle” against screens.

Calder could be grouped with a cohort of young novelists to whom the “voice of a generation” label can easily be applied, alongside the likes of Rooney, Oisín McKenna, Madeleine Gray – writers concerned with how a dismal macroeconomic climate impacts young lives. How does Calder feel about that badge? It “isn’t something I consciously pursue at all”, he says. “It’s unavoidable not to critique capitalism in some way if you’re trying to address the absurdities of how we live now, but I also don’t care about putting my political views in my fiction. The goal is always to just write realistically about how life feels.”

Martin Amis liked to observe that the unusual position he and Kingsley Amis held – father-and-son novelists – was a historical anomaly, a “literary curiosity”. But it was not unique: Alexandre Dumas père and fils, Fanny and Anthony Trollope, and Arthur and Evelyn Waugh had all come before them.

And if Amis’s assertion wasn’t true then, it’s even less true now. In recent years, increasing numbers of children of novelists have become writers themselves, and this year sees a particularly rich batch. Kazuo Ishiguro’s daughter, Naomi, publishes the first in her new fantasy series this month. Margaret Atwood’s daughter Jess Gibson published her fiction debut this spring, and earlier this year Patrick Charnley, son of the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, published his first novel to wide acclaim.

What is behind this trend? Does having a novelist for a parent make it likely that a child will be inspired to follow? Or is it easier for children of writers to get published? I spoke to some novelists who have kept it in the family to find out.

“I met Martin Amis briefly and tried to talk to him about it,” John le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway tells me. “I must have pissed him off as he was running around maintaining [he and Kingsley] were unique, and then I came along and said: ‘Oh, I am too.’” Harkaway has published eight novels, and recently has begun to extend his father’s output, with new novels following established le Carré characters.

Did he realise as a child that his father didn’t have a regular job? “I’m 53 now,” he says, “and it has belatedly occurred to me that my childhood was quite odd. We could be driving through Greece or America [on holiday] and if you stopped at a petrol station, there was a le Carré novel. He was ubiquitous.” Home life could be unusual, too, for a writer of his level of fame. Once, Harkaway recalls, “there was a hush in the house because Isaiah Berlin had dropped in”.

Yet, as Harkaway implies, growing up in a writer’s household didn’t seem unusual at the time; it was all he knew. Deborah Moggach, whose novels include Tulip Fever and These Foolish Things (which was filmed as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), had parents who were both authors. “I think if they’d been butchers, I’d have been a butcher.” What the experience taught her was “what a mysterious yet mundane thing [writing] is, because I thought everyone’s parents must be writers”.

And Deborah’s daughter, Lottie, has also become a novelist – her fourth book, Mrs Pearcey, was published in February. But her mother’s writing did not pervade the home; rather, Lottie says, it was hidden away. “Mum’s writing time was very fixed and sacrosanct.” Her writing wasn’t a part of family life, agrees Deborah. “I felt I was neglecting [my children] because I was a sort of husk, the inner life was with my characters in my books.”

Nor did le Carré share his work with his children, says Harkaway, though he did “read last night’s manuscript” to his wife, Valerie Eustace – who assisted him with his books – in bed in the mornings. “He wrote in a very isolated style. There was a rule that I didn’t go into his office.”

Nonetheless, even when a writing parent isn’t visible at their work, their very presence feeds into the child’s own expectations – whether or not the parent appears to enjoy it. For Amanda Craig, author of 11 novels including her newest, High and Low, writing is “absolute torture and I’m always in a very bad mood unless I’ve had an extremely good day”.

This didn’t dissuade her daughter, Leon Craig, from becoming a writer, publishing a collection of stories, Parallel Hells, and a novel, The Decadence. “Mum always said: ‘Don’t ask me how it’s going, I’ll be happy when it’s done.’ Which maybe doesn’t make it sound that attractive, but it’s very much a way of life.”

Harkaway agrees. His father had “a tempestuous relationship with his own creativity”, but “it’s more about the demonstration of possibility than an endorsement of the job”. He didn’t offer an opinion on whether his son should be a writer: “What he did was demonstrate that it was possible to finish a book and get paid for it.” There is a further persuasive element: for Deborah Moggach, “keeping my door closed for three hours every morning” meant that “it seemed easy. That was the problem for Lottie: she thought it was going to be easy to be a writer.”

One writer who doesn’t have a tempestuous relationship with his creativity is Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who has written for film and TV as well as many children’s books. When his children were young, “It felt like Avalon. I couldn’t believe I was making a living as a writer. I’ve always thought this was a wheeze.”

His son, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, published his debut novel, The End of Nightwork, in 2023. “I do think you have a slight intolerance of people who make heavy weather out of creative tasks,” he tells his father. “It’s not slight,” laughs Frank. “But I think part of that has rubbed off on me,” Aidan adds.

But for Aidan, like all the children of writers I spoke to, it didn’t feel like a choice anyway: it’s harder not to write than to write. “I write every day,” Aidan says. Leon Craig concurs. She wrote “terrible poetry” in her youth (“Terrible!” Amanda agrees), then as an undergraduate felt dissuaded from writing in the face of “all the greats of the western canon”. But then “I was told off by the mother of a friend, who said: ‘Why aren’t you writing any more? I thought you wanted to be a writer.’ And I was really grumpy with her for six months and then I realised she was completely correct.” Amanda adds: “You kind of have no choice. The only thing worse than writing is not writing.”

Once a child of a writer decides to – or is unable not to – do it themselves, do they share this with their parent? “I was very furtive about it,” Leon says. And “my mother hasn’t been allowed to read any of my writing until it’s in printed form, because we’re both very opinionated, and when it’s the person who taught you how to read, those opinions carry a different weight.” “She was totally resistant to being helped,” Amanda adds. “I was such a helicopter parent, you could practically hear my blades whirring. But she pushes me away with great determination.”

Even more furtive was Aidan Cottrell-Boyce – he didn’t tell his father that he was writing at all. Frank explains: “What happened was [the actor] Shaun Evans came round to the house with a copy of Granta, going: ‘I’ve just read Aidan’s story, it’s brilliant.’ I was like: ‘What are you talking about?’” “There was something alluring in my mind,” says Aidan, “about the gag of [not telling him and then] going: ‘Look what I’ve been doing.’ But it’s a gag that only works once.”

It is understandable for the child of a writer to want to create a distance, to make a mark on their own. It can be a sensitive topic. Some debut writers declined to speak to me for this piece, concerned about being seen primarily as the adjunct of an established parent. One second-generation writer, who has published several novels, told me that it was still a very difficult subject for them.

This may be why all the writers I spoke to had been determined to get published without help – at least, without explicit help. Charnley, who was concerned that people would recognise his name after he had accepted the posthumous Costa prize on behalf of Dunmore, even submitted his debut novel, This, My Second Life, under a pseudonym. His first offers came from foreign publishers; they didn’t know his mother, which “gave me a confidence boost”.

It’s not possible to be completely anonymous, though. “My agent was my mum’s agent,” says Charnley, and “the UK publisher who bought the book did know it was me. So I had an advantage there.” For Harkaway, even though both he and his father are published under pseudonyms, “I couldn’t keep it a secret because half the publishers in London had literally changed my nappies.” Harkaway – real name Nicholas Cornwell – used his pen name when submitting his debut novel to an agent, Patrick Walsh, although another agent who knew his identity “called Patrick and said: ‘I’m not going to tell you why you need to read this, but you need to read it.’”

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Does this work, though, from a publisher’s viewpoint? Francis Bickmore, a publisher at Canongate, acknowledges that having a famous writer as a parent may help to get a submitted manuscript read. “I’d be more likely to read it, but a harsher judge.” That is, the connection would “make me more sceptical about how you establish a distance between that author and their famous forebear”.

Even when parents aren’t trying to help, there can be inbuilt bonuses to having a literary family. As Frank Cottrell-Boyce puts it: “If somebody in your family loves doing something, you’re going to pick it up. You’re going to have to find your voice, and your way of doing it, but you do know it’s there.”

“It [makes it] seem possible,” agrees Lottie Moggach. “Whereas for many people who want to write, it seems like a completely closed shop.” Deborah concurs. “I think that’s something you and I took for granted. When I teach and meet people who are not in a literary world, I realise how staggeringly difficult it is for them. You and I started with an advantage. Because my father was a writer, he knew the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, and I reviewed a book for them, and saw my name in print. And that makes a huge difference, not only for one’s career but for one’s confidence.” In addition, when it came to submitting her debut novel, Kiss Me First (which Deborah suggested the title for), Lottie adds: “I was fully aware my name would be helpful in getting it read”. But she was satisfied that “the book was so different from Mum’s it would stand on its own”.

This point about difference may be important. Bickmore observes that in some commercial genres – such as the racing thrillers of Dick Francis – a child can “take over the brand” of their parent’s books, “but that’s not really in the arena of literary writing”, where “you don’t want your style to be reminiscent of your parent’s style”.

One reason why writers are shy of drawing explicitly on their parents is that, as Amanda Craig puts it, “[People] assume that it’s nepotism that got your child published at all. Showbiz is full of nepo babies, but that’s a different thing. What is writing if not an individual talent and vision of how the world is?” Leon adds, “I’m still sending out lots of short stories on submission and getting knocked back. None of these people care who my mother is, they just care about whether they want to put the story in their magazine.”

Once published, it is inevitable that connections will come out, either from the publisher with a nose for publicity or the media keen to tell the story behind the writer. For Charnley, this was not a concern. “I’m proud of the connection. When I read the headline of the Telegraph’s review of my book – something like ‘Helen Dunmore’s magic lives on’ – I was so pleased. I take it as a big compliment. It also gave me a feeling that I have not let her down.”

“For the first two or three books,” Harkaway says, “every article had to mention Dad.” Was that annoying? “I was always slightly aggravated. But this is part of the tax you pay for being here, and the advantages that come with it are so spectacular, you can’t argue the toss.” And anyway, he adds, “As you get older, the less you care. As your body of work expands, you can just point at it.”

This is a key factor. It’s certainly possible that having a famous writer parent could open the first door – Martin Amis acknowledged that any publisher would have taken on his first book out of sheer curiosity – but it can’t sustain a career, unless the books stand up. Bickmore agrees. “I still hope there’s a meritocracy where the best books get through. You want the judgments to be about the quality of the work and not other factors.” He acknowledges, however, that a famous literary parent might offer some marketing pull and media coverage, in terms of “brand recognition. If they’ve got an excellent book, they’re well positioned.”

Why do there seem to be more second-generation novelists today? “Maybe there’s a sense now that anyone can be a writer,” suggests Bickmore. The publishing world, he argues, “has opened up slightly – not radically, but slightly – and maybe more people feel they can [do it]”.

But could there be more to it? Is literary talent heritable? “I don’t really believe in talent,” says Frank Cottrell-Boyce – before quickly handing the baton to Aidan, who hesitantly agrees. “I don’t believe in any sort of mystical thing that’s in you. Probably more than anything else is that all through our childhood you read to us, and we were constantly surrounded by books and storytelling.” Harkaway has a similar view. “If you’re in a household where the currency is stories, it’s an environment which is conducive to learning those tricks.”

On inheritance, Lottie Moggach offers one unconsoling fact. “I thought I would inherit my mother’s work ethic. I didn’t. I’m more distracted, and more angsty.” Deborah responds: “I try to bolster her up by saying how wonderful she is, but I’m her mother! Mothers say that about their children.” “I appreciate it!” adds Lottie.

Deborah points out that “Kingsley [Amis] was jealous of Martin’s books.” (In 1979 he wrote to his friend Philip Larkin about his son: “Did I tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE? … Little shit. 29, he is.”) Deborah concludes: “That’s the last thing you should be, because a parent should want their children to do better than them.”

But Charnley’s view probably summarises the only thing we can say for sure on the cross-generational writing experience. “I don’t know whether it’s genetic, or just witnessing the process, seeing that it’s something that can be done,” he says. “All I know is that my mother was a writer, and now I’m a writer.”

Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, genocide in Gaza, invasion of Syria and relentless bombardment of Lebanon. The fact that the US joined in this illegal war confirmed to many in the region what they have long suspected: that the country is an outpost of western imperialism in the Middle East.

The state of Israel, which arose from the ashes of the Holocaust 77 years ago, has received an unprecedented degree of international sympathy and support ever since. This support was partly due to western guilt and partly due to the perception of the Jewish state as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. The country’s Declaration of Independence promised to uphold “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex”. In the early years of statehood, Israel was seen in the west as an icon of liberal, progressive and egalitarian society.

Today, it is widely regarded as an immoral, violent, cruel and oppressive apartheid state. The Israeli response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was a major milestone in the gradual slide to its status as an international pariah. Israel claimed the right to self-defence, but proceeded to act in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. The international court of justice in The Hague found that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take a series of measures to stop it. Israel, as is its wont, ignored the ruling. A UN commission concluded that Israel was, in fact, guilty of genocide. The international criminal court issued a warrant for the arrest of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes. The Israeli state thus stands credibly accused of war crimes, of crimes against humanity, and even of the crime of crimes – genocide.

The moral and political degradation of Israel is the subject of this remarkable book. The author, Omer Bartov, has impeccable credentials for writing it: he was born on a kibbutz, he served as an officer in the IDF, and is currently professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US. It is dedicated to his father, Hanoch Bartov, “the last Zionist”, a reference to the liberal brand of Zionism to which the whole family were evidently dedicated. Yet this book is written more in sorrow than in anger. Its goal is not to condemn Zionism but to explain its evolution from a dream to a nightmare.

To do so, Bartov goes back to the formation of Israel in 1948. In a chapter entitled The Missing Constitution, he bemoans the failure of the founding fathers to resolve the question of how a multi-ethnic state can remain both Jewish and democratic; in other words, their failure to square the circle of ethno-nationalism and pluralism.

Had a written constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence been adopted, he argues, and had generations of Israelis been raised with respect for the constitution and pride in a bill of rights for all human beings, “the creeping racism of Israeli society might have been tempered, and the astonishing indifference to the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and the daily crimes and pogroms on the West Bank might have elicited a greater sense of scandal”. Maybe. History does not disclose its alternatives. Arguably, however, Bartov does not go back far enough in history to explore the roots of Israeli racism. Zionism is a self-avowed settler-colonial movement and its principal political progeny – the state of Israel – is a settler-colonial state. The logic of settler-colonialism is the elimination of the natives in order to take over the land and its resources. Ethnic cleansing is the means by which this goal is achieved. In 1948, the newly born state of Israel carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine: 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”. From the point of view of the victims, the viciousness of Zionism is nothing new; they have known it all along.

Moreover, the Nakba was not a one-off event; it is an ongoing process. This process reached its climax in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. Israel’s original aim was to depopulate the whole of the Gaza Strip, with its 2.3 million inhabitants, by pushing them across the international border into northern Sinai. When this plan was resisted by Egypt, Israel resorted to the wholesale destruction of Gaza to make it uninhabitable. As Bartov notes, ethnic cleansing can escalate into genocide, and genocide in Gaza was accompanied by the intensified ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

As a historian, Bartov believes that the first step in building a better future is understanding the hopes and aspirations of the other, as well as the errors and sins of the past. One hopeful conclusion that he draws from Israel’s campaign in Gaza is that, in the long term, it will liberate Israel itself from its status as a unique state rooted in the Holocaust. This will hardly help the 73,000 Palestinian victims, but it does give rise to a faint hope that the licence that Israel has enjoyed throughout its history may be expiring.

Anyone seeking an explanation of Israel’s “fall from grace” will find no better guide than this perceptive, sophisticated, erudite, elegantly written and strikingly fair-minded book. Even traditional supporters of Israel, who are feeling discomfort, perhaps even disgust, at its recent atrocities, may find in Omer Bartov, to borrow the title of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon’s famous 12th-century book, A Guide for the Perplexed.

The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed (Gollancz, £22)
On a gigantic spaceship halfway through its 400-year voyage to a new world, hundreds of Earth colonists are kept in frozen stasis by the ever-increasing maintenance crew. Not all the crew are happy with the way their lives are harshly controlled by the Administration, and peaceful protests have inspired whispers of revolution. The multicultural city-ship has two official languages: Inglez and Arabek. Iskander Ezz is a translator between Crew and Administration, aware that “when you speak a different language, you become another person”. Damietta, his younger cousin, finds the unofficial Nupol better for communicating with her fellow protesters. Nupol, an argot made up of many “dead Earth” languages, is used throughout the book by several viewpoint characters, adding a distinctive flavour to a speculative fiction its author calls Arabfuturism. Partly inspired by the historic Arab spring, this is a thoughtful, exciting space opera.

The Rainshadow Orphans by Naomi Ishiguro (Solstice, £20)
The first volume of a trilogy inspired by Japanese pop culture is set in bustling, crowded Rainshadow City, where hi-tech wealth and a corrupt emperor exist alongside magic, poverty and criminality. Toshiko, Jun and Mei are the Kawakamis, haphazardly seeking revenge on the Lucky Crow gang for the murder of their adoptive Aunt. When Toshiko almost accidentally steals a precious dragon pearl from a powerful gangster, they’re plunged into a fast-moving adventure involving a conspiracy to deport all the city’s illegal immigrants to certain death, and replace low-paid workers with attractive female robots. Various plot strands see characters discovering magical powers, a mother dragon desperate to save her baby’s life, and a strangely helpful cat. Trope-heavy, entertaining fun, with a cartoonish vibe.

No Ghosts by Max Lury (Peninsula Press, £12.99)
The ghosts are gone: that’s what psychics and mediums all over Britain say. Kieran never believed in ghosts, but driven by loneliness and the hope of finding out what happened to his missing friend Annie, he becomes involved with a group trying to recreate the connection they used to get during seances. Meanwhile Harlow, who was Annie’s best friend, becomes obsessed with fragments of AI-generated film, certain she’s seen Annie in them. She meets others who share her obsession with putting these fragments together, and both plot strands become increasingly weird. A closely observed, meticulously described study of the emotional undercurrents of contemporary life, it’s also a deeply strange tale of emergent hauntings, a brilliantly original ghost story for our times.

Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler (W&N, £22)
June 1941: Neriya, a doctor’s daughter, follows a crow into the depths of a Lithuanian forest, and avoids death at the hands of invading Germans who loot and burn her village. Czeslaw, an underage soldier in the Red Army, the sole survivor of his band, takes refuge in the same forest. Later they’re joined by Kezia, a Roma girl used to living off the land, and a traumatised, speechless little boy. The crows play an important part in the story, giving warning when danger is near, and revealing unexpected aspects of their own way of life in this constantly surprising, moving and thought-provoking novel from the author of The Mountain in the Sea.

Moon Over Brendle by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot, £9.99)
In the Lancashire of 1968, the world is different from ours in one respect: Greot. No one knows why this strange multicoloured dust drifts through the air and settles everywhere, only becoming visible briefly at night. For the rest of the time, only a very few can see it: Joe Sutter is one of those with the gift. Like the author of this book, he was 11 years old in 1968 and grew up to write science fiction novels. The novel is presented as Joe’s memoir of that one life-defining year, when an encounter with a dying man, the prolific author of forgotten pulp fiction, set him on the path to becoming a writer himself. An unusual, magical faux-autobiography, this is a vividly written delight.

‘Never predictable or dull’

Carol was an excellent commentator on poetry, shrewd and deep-thinking but able to express her thoughts in plain English rather than academic jargon. Her taste in poems was eclectic and very original; one didn’t always share it, but it was never predictable or dull. Sheenagh Pugh, Shetland

‘Carol made Mondays something to look forward to’

Looking out for Carol Rumens’ poem of the week made Mondays something to look forward to. It was a weekly fixture to break off for a few minutes at some point in the day and be introduced to something or someone I inevitably didn’t know, but was glad to meet. I’ve been checking the culture section weekly since her last column and hoping Carol was enjoying a holiday somewhere. So I’m sad to hear we won’t be getting the benefit of her generous insights again, but what an archive to have left us. Thank you Carol. Anonymous

Carol was good enough to choose my poem, Material Culture, as a poem of the week in 2015. Not only did she give it an acute introduction – probably better than it deserved – she also was a sympathetic ear when the, shall we say, rather snarky comments rolled in below the line from the Guardian’s famous poetry reading public! Her kindness to me as well as the Guardian column led me to her own poetry, which is very fine. I’m surprised that she was 81: she seemed much younger. David Ward, retired poet, Virginia

‘She lit the way for female poets’

I took workshops with Carol in University College Cork in the 1990s and she was an inspiration. Always very grateful for her support of my work and many other poets – and as a way-lighter for female poets – whose work I admire, and for her insight into poetry through the Guardian column. One of a kind. She will be much missed. Anonymous

‘A tremendous poet, cosmopolitan humanist, inspiring mentor and friend’

Carol was always politically relevant, always promoted poetry as a vital, nuanced, informed and emotionally intelligent discourse about world events. I’ll be for ever grateful for her attention to my work in the column and am glad I could help publish her work as well. Rest in poetry, Carol Rumens – tremendous poet, sparkling, generous, cosmopolitan humanist and my wonderful, inspiring mentor and friend. My deepest sympathies to Carol’s family and all her loved ones. Naomi Foyle, Chichester

‘She had a common touch that made her columns profoundly democratic’

How much of a loss Carol Rumens is to us poets and to the Guardian. I’m shocked by her sudden death (she used two of my poems in the column within the last 18 months). She was a uniquely even-handed appreciator of poems from all sectors of the poetry world but had a common touch that made her columns profoundly democratic. Her achievement was exceptional and remarkable. She was personally kind to me when a hostile poet upset me at one of my first festival readings, and I’ve never forgotten that humanity in her. Gwyneth Lewis, poet, Wales

‘Enormous generosity’

I was amazed the first time that Carol featured my work in poem of the week. And when she did so a second time, I was beyond astounded. She also included me in the Smart Devices selection, which meant an awful lot to me. But these things are just personal examples of her enormous generosity. She will be missed by poets, publishers and readers of poetry. Billy Mills, Ireland

‘You will always be in my heart’

I feel so sad tonight having just read this article about Carol Rumens’ death. I am sure all of us who followed and commented on her weekly poetry choices are feeling the same. I can’t write you a poem Carol. but you will always be in my heart for your words and wisdom and humour over the years. Thank you Carol. Patricia, England

‘She featured a poet I recommended to her — then dedicated a poem to him after his death’

I never met Carol Rumens in person but, from May 2016 when she featured To a Nightingale by the English late-modernist poet RF Langley, I began posting comments below the line of poem of the week, sometimes engaging in discussions with her and others in that space. She became the most influential facilitator of poetic talent in the English-language media through her stewardship of poem of the week.

In between, she wrote often astute critical commentaries introducing work by poets from all over the world. She may have been underrated or undervalued as a contemporary British poet and critic, but she never condescended to the unknown or unsung. She was generous enough to consider recommendations from others, as when, in June 2018, she featured Leaving home at 10, from Nigerian poet and literary scholar Harry Garuba’s final collection Animist Chants and Memorials (2017), a copy of which I had sent her. Garuba died of leukaemia, aged 61, in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2020, and Carol wrote the poem A Bed of Wild Strawberries, dedicated to him, and published in Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love: A Gedenkschrift for Harry Garuba (2022). Idowu Omoyele, Kent

‘Carol’s choices were eclectic, not always to my taste but that didn’t matter’

I’ve always liked poetry but it hovered in the background playing second fiddle to novels and films. When I discovered the Guardian online 20 years ago, I noticed the PotW column and decided to join in to bring poetry in from the cold. Carol’s choices were eclectic, not always to my taste, but that often didn’t matter as it was a great insight into how work was created. She joined in too, so wasn’t aloof. Edward Taylor, Lancashire

‘I lacked confidence, then Carol chose one of my poems for her column’

Carol chose one of my poems early on for her poem of the week: it was ahead of my first book publication and I was still a little confused about “how to poet” and “whether to poet”: I lacked confidence and couldn’t feel my voice as actually mine. Every poem I wrote seemed to me a mishmash of other, older, better poems. It’s impossible to overstate how much the mere fact of being taken seriously, of having my poem delicately and seriously taken apart, each piece held up to the light, made me certain that I wasn’t going wrong or presuming too much. I have been grateful for more than 20 years for that sensitivity and insight. Anonymous

‘Many of her selections have become my favourite poems’

I looked forward to Mondays with Carol’s choice of poem. So many of her selections have become favourite poems and she introduced me to many new poets. Douglas Kemp

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.

Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.

The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant (The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening.) AI had translated the sentence’s meaning but was seemingly unaware that the repetitions rendered the line absurd. It was far inferior to his own translation that would be published in the book a year later: L’air pur et piquant de la nuit, vivifiant.

When Gentric repeated his experiment this spring, however, the outcome made him feel less at ease: L’air nocturne était vif, pur et vivifiant, DeepL suggested this time. The online translator still lost the sentence’s stylistic trait by adding a verb, but it had learned to use three different words that even had a musical ring to them. “I don’t know if it’s just chance or a fine-tuned algorithm at work, but nocturne and pur is not bad,” said Gentric.

Chatbots running on large language models (LLMs) – neural networks trained on vast amounts of text to generate natural-sounding language – are rapidly infiltrating every aspect of our work and leisure lives. But few professional sectors are being disrupted by the technology as rapidly as the translation industry in Europe, home to more than 200 languages and a booming tech sector.

According to a recent joint survey by the French authors’ societies ADAGP and the Société des Gens de Lettres, 79% of translators believe the rise of AI “poses a threat of replacing all or part of their work”. In Britain, a 2025 survey found that 84% of translators questioned expected lower demand for human translation, resulting in lower pay.

Those fears concern the future, but for many translators the nature of their work has already changed. Laura Radosh, a Berlin-based German-to-English translator, used to get about four job requests per month from clients including universities, professors and museums. Last year, the number of offers dropped to one each month.

Many of them were “post-editing” jobs, which required her to correct texts that had already been run through a machine-translation engine. “Post-editing took me as much time as translating from scratch,” said Radosh.

Far less creatively fulfilling than translating from scratch, post-editing is also less well-paid: usually compensated by the hour rather than by the page or by the book, it is paid “at unacceptable rates considering the work involved”, according to the French translators’ association. In Germany, publishers have been found to offer typical rates of two to eight euros per page – a quarter of the average pay for translating a page from scratch.

But rates for regular technical translations have tumbled too. “I got offered a job at 60 cent[s] a line,” said Radosh. “Before then, 80 cent[s] was the lowest rate I had ever come across.”

Even before the advent of LLMs, translation was a precarious profession: a recent survey by the German translators association VdÜ found that the average income for literary translators – traditionally at the lower-paid end of the sector – was as little as €20,363 euros per annum before tax. But the latest changes in the industry mean that for many translators, the numbers no longer stack up – Radosh recently took a part-time job doing book-keeping for an NGO.

Marco Trombetti, the co-founder and CEO of the machine translation company Translated, said: “Without help, the human brain basically is able to produce about 3,000 words a day of translation. Beginners will manage about 1,500, the best translator in the world may manage 6,000, but the variation is not that big.”

The cost of human translation, he argued, had until now been defined by the number of neurons we have in the brain. “That’s around 100bn,” Trombetti said. “But if we change that, then we change the unit economics of translation.”

Yet the speed of technological change is also revealing what human translators still do best. For one, many machine translators still struggle with context. The German-British academic publisher Springer Nature offers its authors the option to have their books auto-translated into other languages for free, but in spite of assurances of subsequent “human checks”, this process has in the past led to comical results.

In 2024, Springer Nature machine-translated into German an English-language book by a group of Indian academics called ‘Capital’ in the East: Reflections on Marx. In the chapter headings, however, the machine translator DeepL had rendered “capital” not as Kapital in the intended sense, but Hauptstadt, meaning “capital city”.

A spokesperson for Springer Nature said in a statement: “Our AI‑supported translation is human‑led and reviewed by professional editors. Errors like this are rare and regrettable, and this instance relates to a limited pilot that has since ended.”

Jörn Cambreleng, the director of Atlas, a French organisation promoting literary translation, said: “Machine translation is not creative. These systems are built to produce sentences that are generic, sentences that have been said before or sound like they have been said before. Whereas good human translators strive to put into words something that has never been said before.”

One of the ironies of the upheaval is that literary translation now appears to be a comparatively safer career choice than its technical counterpart.

The HarperCollins-owned imprint Harlequin France has confirmed that it is working with a French communications agency, Fluent Planet, to produce translations that are generated by AI software and then post-edited by humans, although for now such trial runs are confined to the pulpier reaches of the market: Harlequin’s titles include A Mistress’s Confession and The Embrace of a Prince.

In Germany, where the total number of new published books has been gradually declining year on year, literature in translation has held up remarkably well, with 8,765 books in translation published in 2024 making up a historically high 15% of the overall output. Increasingly, authors are also contractually obliging their publishers not to use AI in the translation process, said Marieke Heimburger, a Danish-to-German translator who chairs VdÜ.

“AI really cannot do dialogue,” said Katy Derbyshire, a Berlin-based translator who has rendered into English novels by Clemens Meyer, Christa Wolf and others. “When you are translating from scratch, you learn to understand the characters and their motivations, and you’re constantly adjusting them in your head – to individual situations, but also to genre. The dialogue that AI came up with just didn’t suit the character description at all.”

Being human helped the translation process, she added. “My body has experienced all the pain and the joy that literature strives to convey. I understand what someone might scream when they hit their toe on the bed frame – an algorithm doesn’t.”

Fernando Prieto Ramos, of the University of Geneva’s faculty of translation and interpreting, said his centre had noticed a drop in applications to translation courses three years ago, when the rise of generative AI fuelled the hype around machine translation. “But the trend is gradually reverting again with a more diversified training offer,” he said.

Even people who develop machine translation software concede there are tasks that remain beyond their product’s reach. “If in Italian I say Solo tre parole: non sei solo, then a literal translation into English would be ‘Just three words: you are not alone,’” said Trombetti, who founded Translated in 1999. “But you’ve ended up with four words, not three. That’s something that machine translation still struggles with.”

Heimburger said: “I am not really scared of AI, because I know it cannot do what I can do. What I am afraid of is the people who think that AI can do my job.”

It is 1483 and 10-year-old John Collan is living on a farm outside Oxford with his father, Will, and waging war on an aggressive goat that keeps trampling him. His mother is long dead and his older twin brothers, Oliver and Tom, have left home to begin apprenticeships. One morning John overhears the dairy maid Jennot discussing how Edward Plantagenet and his younger brother Richard, sons of the late King Edward IV, have been imprisoned in the Tower of London by their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Later, a well-dressed man arrives on a chestnut horse for a meeting with his father. John learns that the man is his benefactor who has paid for him to be tutored. “A bright future!” Will tells his son. “But secret for now.”

A dramatic imagining of the true story of the royal impostor Lambert Simnel, Jo Harkin’s novel tells of a farmboy who is told that he is Edward V, 17th Earl of Warwick, rightful heir to the English throne and the elder prince in the tower. Having been tutored in great literature and courtly ways, our protagonist becomes a hapless pawn in the games of ambitious conspirators and is sent to Ireland where he becomes the figurehead of the Yorkist rebellion against the so-called usurper Henry VII.

The actor John Hollingworth delivers a confident and charismatic reading of this gripping and bawdily entertaining novel that delights in ripe early Tudor vernacular. When the rebellion against Henry fails, the life of Edward, AKA Lambert and John, is spared, leaving him to find his own path away from the machinations of strangers.

Available via Bloomsbury, 14hr 37min

Further listening

The Tiger’s Share
Keshava Guha, John Murray, 10hr 43min
Nikki Patel narrates this tale of sibling rivalry and patriarchy set in Delhi. The lives of two siblings – Tara and Rohit – are turned upside down after their father announces he is leaving his fortune not to them but to the cause of climate activism.

The Tremolo Diaries
Justin Currie, New Modern, 8hr 17min
The Del Amitri frontman reflects on a life mostly spent on the road with his band and the life-altering diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, aged 58, that threatened to derail his career.