Book and Author News

The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the fabulous life of Barbara Cartland | Biography books

Tony Ramos — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:19:15 +0000

Barbara Cartland was famous for dictating her novels. With a pekingese clamped to her hot pink bosom she would lie back on a library couch and exhale a story about virginal girls taming wayward dukes, damaged airmen or misunderstood surgeons. Meanwhile Miss Savory, Mrs Smith or Mrs Morgan, picked for being unfidgety and sneezeless, would take everything down in immaculate Pitman shorthand. Cartland reckoned on being able to polish off 8,000 words a day. “In this way,” she told one of the many reporters who quizzed her on her astonishing productivity, “the typescript for an 80,000-word novel is finished in a fortnight.” At her peak she was pushing out 23 books a year which added up to 723 in total. Only Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare topped her lifetime sales of 750m.

Cartland was a dictator in other ways, too. Husbands, dogs, houses and the local council were all expected to bend themselves to her indomitable will. Resistance, let alone opposition, was futile. The managing director of the company that printed her books suggested that she read Nietzsche on the perceptive grounds that they had a lot of ideas in common. Oddly, he also declared himself madly in love with her. Behind that marshmallowy exterior, all pink chiffon, candyfloss hair and soft, smudgy lines, there lurked sinews of high-tensile steel.

Anyone expecting this biography of Barbara Cartland to be an amusing takedown of a monstre sacré along the lines of Craig Brown’s witty 2017 decimation of Princess Margaret will be disappointed. Rather, Matthew Sweet pays his subject the compliment of absolute seriousness, regarding her as a cultural phenomenon whose extraordinary life, stretching the entire 20th century, deserves deep study. Sweet has had unfettered access to the cornucopia of material that Cartland left behind at Camfield Place, the Hertfordshire manor house where she lived until her death in 2000 at the age of 98. Conducting a fingertip search of her letters, scrapbooks and typescripts, Sweet has crafted a generous but clear-sighted account of a woman who was too often reduced to the status of a lazy joke.

She was born in 1901 into the lower upper class. On her father’s side she was pure trade. James Cartland and Son was a Birmingham metalworkers turning out umbrella stands, crocodile-shaped inkwells, shelf brackets shaped like sea monsters and “pharaonic letterboxes embossed with meaningless hieroglyphs”. Her adored mother Polly, meanwhile, was Gloucestershire gentry and there had been the usual rows about marrying down. Cartland’s paternal grandfather killed himself when the business went bust and her father retreated into alcoholism, leaving Polly to manage the tricky business of getting her daughter launched into a life the family could no longer afford.

Sweet suggests that this constellation of losses and compensations set the emotional template for Cartland’s adult life. Men were necessary but fragile and certainly best not relied upon. Having come out as a deb in 1919 into a world where there were not enough husbands to go round, Barbara set out to become financially self-sufficient by plunging into the only kind of work for which she was qualified. For the next decade she filed gossipy titbits about young London society to the Express, the Mirror and the Daily Mail.

This was the world of the Bright Young Things, so often written up today as a madcap time of pyjama parties and midnight dashes to the continent. In fact, Cartland’s columns reveal a society still in shock from the first world war: fathers are dead (Cartland lost hers in the trenches in 1918), grand family houses have been sold, divorce is everywhere and life seems impossible without alcohol or drugs. The men whom Cartland stepped out with were not the heart-throb dukes and dashing airmen that she would later write about, but broken people without the language to express their desolation. “My contemporaries were ashamed to show emotion,” she observed with characteristic perception in her 1943 memoir The Isthmus Years. “We had all of us a horror of sympathy.”

So instead she simply carried on with a brittle determination to make the best of things. After plenty of dalliances with men called things like Pingo Langrishe and Nigs Ratendone she made a tactical marriage to a dull man called Alexander McCorquodale who was heir to a printing fortune. When he retreated into drink – shades of her father – she effected a neat swap by divorcing, then marrying his paternal cousin. In this way there was no need to change her surname: she had replaced one Mr McCorquodale with another. It rankled that she never achieved a title until she herself was made a Dame in 1991. By contrast, her ambitious daughter, Raine, managed to insert herself into the peerage not once but three times through each of her carefully strategic marriages.

The only man who really mattered to Cartland was her beloved younger brother, Ronald. They went on holiday together and endlessly discussed the cod-eastern philosophies that were all the rage in the 1920s: Ouspensky and Gurdjieff were favourites and Cartland retained a vague mysticism to the end of her life involving ghosts and spiritual healing. She also believed in flying saucers and the power of honey to cure just about anything.

Brother and sister bonded too over politics, specifically a socially engaged, internationalist Toryism. Barbara bossed Ronald into parliament where he became a leading anti-appeaser. She in turn wrote one of the first of the tiny number of 1930s British novels that dealt specifically with the evils of Nazi antisemitism. Dangerous Experiment (1936) involves the improbable story of Lena Carrington who, after a shipwreck and a spell as the slave of a tribe of thunder-worshippers in the Caucasus, ends up in Germany where she is courted by a Nazi lover. In the end she breaks things off when she sees him mistreating a Jewish refugee.

This, of course, is not the Barbara Cartland that most of us remember from the 80s and beyond. In what Sweet calls her “imperial phase” she was writing novels with paper-thin plots that she endlessly recycled. She was also a relentless self-promoter. Bed linen, candles and towels were all enthusiastically marketed under her name, although with remarkable restraint she drew the line at scented toilet paper. She also pulled off a promotion with Dewhurst the butcher, which offered customers one of six previously unpublished Cartland novels for every £12 they spent. The promotion was not a great success because of the sheer weirdness of “being given a copy of Desire in the Desert with a parcel of mince”.

skip past newsletter promotion

But when, in a stroke of fortune so improbable that even now it hardly seems real, her daughter, Raine, became Diana Spencer’s stepmother, Cartland sensed new opportunities for cross-pollination. She took to announcing “I invented virgins” and managed to imply that the royal wedding of 1981 was somehow her doing, despite being pointedly not invited. Raine, a chip off the old block, made sure that the gift shop at the Spencer family seat, Althorp, stocked a full run of Barbara Cartlands.

It would be easy to dismiss Cartland as a quirk, an aberration the likes of which we will not see again. But the great triumph of this brilliant book is the way that Sweet embeds her firmly in the economic, political, social and artistic transformations of the 20th century while charting the ways in which she also transcended them. Somehow, and this remains the deep mystery of it all, Barbara Cartland emerges as that rather admirable thing: an entirely self-made woman.

Source link

The post The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the fabulous life of Barbara Cartland | Biography books appeared first on Book and Author News.

Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, August 26th

Tony Ramos — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:18:33 +0000

A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.

Source link

The post Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, August 26th appeared first on Book and Author News.

Passage by Colin Thubron review – mortality and memory in a gem of a novel | Books

Tony Ramos — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:11:04 +0000

Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance.

Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. This is not the teeming Egypt of Cairo or Alexandria, but of the countryside, the villages, and the great immemorial tombs and ancient monuments. The best travel writers know that “abroad” is most convincingly evoked not by awed exclamations at the world’s wonders, but by an attitude of relaxed familiarity. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is.

The story he tells is both simple and subtle. The main character is Kathleen, an Anglicised Australian actor whose father had emigrated from Slovenia. She is in her 40s, beautiful and gravely ill, and the brief first chapter is a toe-curlingly stark description of an operation on her brain to investigate a tumour which, as we will learn, is incurable.

As it happens, Kathleen’s husband, Robert, is himself a brain specialist, and has elected, unwisely, to be present at the operation, “standing as far away as space allows … He finds himself staring speechless into his wife’s brain. It is a turmoil of ink and crimson coils, faintly pulsing under the surgeon’s instrument.” Kathleen is awake, and answering questions that will help the doctor to identify cancerous tissue.

Robert and Kathleen’s marriage has gone stale; also, it has a historical blemish, since it was Robert’s younger brother, Alan, who first met Kathleen and fell in love with her when they were both in their teens. The one who loved the most was Alan; Kathleen, having returned home to Melbourne, wrote to him more and more infrequently, then not at all. “It was not until six years later that she reappeared, on Robert’s arm.”

Kathleen is a wonderful creation: strong-willed, outspoken, and above all clear-eyed, about herself and others. She knows how ill she is, but is determined not to give in to self-pity and to live her life as fully as she can to the end, even if the end should prove bitter. Although the surgeon advises against it, she insists, only weeks after the operation, on setting off, with Robert and Alan – yes, Alan does seem a glutton for heartache – on the Egyptian holiday that had been planned before she became ill.

One of the most admirable aspects of the book is Thubron’s restraint in exploiting the symbolic possibilities that this journey holds out to him. Egypt, after all, or the parts of it that the travellers visit, is itself a kind of afterworld. “The temple city that was gathering around them, with its unreadable carvings and maimed statues, was a ruined monument to death and memory.”

Death and memory: these are the poles between which Kathleen’s dwindling existence is strung. What for the other tourists are more or less interesting sites, and sights, are for her the points of exit that she must soon step through: “When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw in front of her a gold-lit corridor that appeared to reach into infinity. In its walls, painted gods marched or floated through an ocean of hieroglyphs. Above her spread a constellation of stars.”

When she encounters a local guide, the soft-spoken and quietly considerate Ashraf, it seems she is being offered another and surely final chance at love. However, she knows it is an impossibility: “She imagined his hands encountering with horror the sutures under her hair.” What she does not know is that Ashraf, a political activist, is already a marked man, as she is a marked woman, in a different way, and for different reasons.

skip past newsletter promotion

Passage is an exquisitely wrought novel which, for all its understated, filigree texture, reverberates in the mind with poetic force. The record of Kathleen’s passage from life into the not-life is at once tragic and affirmative. “No matter, she was moving through a sacred theatre where gods and humans transformed into each other, as if they shared one essence, the immortal and the transient interfused.”

Source link

The post Passage by Colin Thubron review – mortality and memory in a gem of a novel | Books appeared first on Book and Author News.

Triage by Claudia Rankine review – how should we respond to the world’s atrocities? | Claudia Rankine

Tony Ramos — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:58:31 +0000

“Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental,” writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. “Unless it isn’t.” The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us “to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for”. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall?

The book begins with a friendship. Two young people – our narrator, and another she refers to only as “the theorist” – meet in college in the late 20th century, and are drawn to each other. They’re passionate; they’re idealistic; they’re committed to the activism of the time (“shantytowns were built on campus to protest apartheid South Africa”) and steeped in the texts and authors and philosophical conceits of the humanities. Over time, they develop a game. “When we spied each other during the day,” the narrator explains, “we had to collapse.”

This collapse is “literal, and on occasion, an inconvenience to those around us”: the pair fall to the ground “in the dirt, grass, on cement, wood”, all over campus. They become known for it (“Aren’t you the two who fall?”), even though they themselves don’t seem, fully, to understand what their falling means. That it is a response to the “toomuchness” of the world around them, to “all the fevered wretchedness we had no answers for”, is without question. But what exactly the response itself signifies is less clear. Looking back from a vantage point 40 or more years into the future, the narrator offers a range of possible interpretations: “a refusal of continuance”; “a way to say things were unaligned”; perhaps just “the easiest way to keep from breaking apart”. But between the narrator and the theorist, the meaning of the game is never definitively pinned down.

And it is perhaps this ambiguity that exists between them, even at the heart of a game that binds them to each other, that eventually drives them apart. The years pass; the world becomes wilder, more brutal, less sane; the crises and disasters to which the theorist and the narrator could, or should, respond multiply and intertwine. In the face of this worsening world, what began as a hair’s-breadth difference in the interpretation of their college game widens into a chasm. On the one side, the narrator sees her role as one of witnessing: her purpose, as she perceives it, is to record the atrocities around her, to acknowledge them, to mark them and to grieve them. Her work takes her into art criticism, and she focuses on images of couches, because “within the collapse, [they] seemed a place to land”. The theorist, on the other hand, is not content with reaction; they are compelled to act. What matters about falling for them isn’t the collapse itself, but the fact that the act of collapsing pushes them to rise up, over and over again.

Triage acknowledges the validity of both characters’ responses – the witnessing and bearing of grief versus the acts of intervention and remaking. The book itself is a fantastical hybrid – part memoir, part reportage, part essay, part lyrical lament – and the complexity of its construction both mirrors and engages with our present moment’s contradictions. But in the end, the question of what is the right, the proportionate, even the realistic response to the world’s atrocities becomes subsumed by the question of which is the hopeful one.

Triage is a challenging book for challenging times: it forces us to look at the world around us without blinking. There may be, as the narrator suggests in one of her final conversations with the theorist, “no solutions, only recognitions”. But at the same time, Rankine is clear that the truth of that statement doesn’t render action redundant: the book proposes courses of action even if it doesn’t offer the false promise of success. “Trying in the face of defeat is a thing,” the theorist argues. “For you, loss is a state of grief; for me, it’s a state to refuse … Things are unachievable only when you need the road to be short.”

Triage by Claudia Rankine is published by Allen Lane (£22).To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

skip past newsletter promotion

Source link

The post Triage by Claudia Rankine review – how should we respond to the world’s atrocities? | Claudia Rankine appeared first on Book and Author News.

Badenoch plotted to remove Sunak as PM months before election, book claims | Conservatives

Tony Ramos — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:56:59 +0000

Kemi Badenoch plotted with fellow Conservative cabinet ministers to remove Rishi Sunak as prime minister months before the general election, it has been claimed.

Anthony Seldon, who has written political biographies of every prime minister since John Major, has alleged in a new book that Badenoch, who was business secretary at the time, phoned several other cabinet ministers to ask “if anyone was interested in changing the captain”.

An ally of Badenoch, who is now the Conservative leader, described the claim as “total bollocks”.

The book about Sunak’s time as prime minister, which is being serialised in the Independent, says Badenoch did not respect Sunak, who she believed had been rude to her. Citing a series of sources, it says she sought to oust Sunak in 2023, when he faced considerable internal pressure over migration policy.

It quotes one Conservative MP, who the book says is now a member of Badenoch’s frontbench team, as saying she was “a menace who orchestrated trouble in the cabinet” under Sunak.

The book, titled Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative PM?, cites another unnamed “insider” as saying Badenoch “was actively looking at bringing Sunak down, constructing imaginary cabinets and offering jobs”.

After Robert Jenrick resigned as immigration minister in December 2023 over the details of Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, the book says Badenoch discussed telling Sunak she would resign from the cabinet if he did not amend the policy, with some people recounting that Badenoch “had promised she would ‘take him out’”.

It was at this point, the book says, that Badenoch contacted other cabinet ministers to see if any wanted a change in PM. It says she wanted “to avoid the image of wielding the knife”.

Danny Kruger, a then Conservative MP who, like Jenrick, has since defected to Reform, told Seldon that Badenoch “definitely wanted” to remove Sunak and replace him “but was concerned about being a fag-end prime minister” given the looming election.

Seldon says in the book that Badenoch decided against any challenge because she thought this would lead to her being blamed for an election defeat. It also says another reason for caution was Badenoch’s worry that she might lose a leadership contest to Penny Mordaunt, the then leader of the Commons.

The book says the plotting prompted Sunak to condemn what he called “attention-seeking” rebels and he told allies: “They probably want me to tell them to fuck off so they can pontificate, but I have a country to run. I’m not going to rise to the bait.”

Sunak said the impression of plotting and infighting pushed down the Tory vote and made the eventual election defeat in July 2024 even worse.

Badenoch was in the cabinet throughout Sunak’s time as PM, first as trade secretary and then business secretary. She had stood to become Conservative leader in the 2022 internal party contest after Boris Johnson announced he was stepping down, finishing fourth behind Liz Truss, Sunak and Mordaunt. Sunak became prime minister without a contest after Truss’s premiership imploded in just 45 days.

After the general election defeat, Badenoch became Tory leader, beating Jenrick in a vote of Conservative members.

Dissatisfaction with Sunak was far from uncommon among Conservative MPs and ministers as the party headed towards what was seen as an inevitable election defeat, even if most accepted he had inherited a near-impossible situation.

There was little appetite for yet another change of leader, however, which would have brought about a sixth Conservative prime minister inside eight years.

Sunak’s office was contacted for comment.

Source link

The post Badenoch plotted to remove Sunak as PM months before election, book claims | Conservatives appeared first on Book and Author News.

Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, August 25th

Tony Ramos — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 23:54:43 +0000

A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.

Source link

The post Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, August 25th appeared first on Book and Author News.

Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter review – hope amid the hopelessness | Natasha Walter

Tony Ramos — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:49:01 +0000

It has become increasingly difficult to change our minds, to question our own views or to find common ground with people we disagree with, all of which makes Natasha Walter’s new book both refreshing and exhilarating.

In her ebullient 1998 debut The New Feminism, Walter hailed Margaret Thatcher as a trailblazer. In this fiercer, bleaker work, she rips into the “glossy language of aspiration feminism”, “the message that the individual woman can do anything she wants if she only has the necessary courage”. That kind of feminism inspired an “explosion of books and films about pioneers and heroines, about bossy women and gutsy girls” which retold the feminist story as “a succession of isolated campaigns, led by outsize individuals”.

Instead, Walter advocates for ecofeminism, and for solidarity and sisterhood, “narratives that focus less on how I win on my own, and more on how we thrive together”. She’s serious about that “we”, marshalling stories from across the globe. Walter founded the charity Women for Refugee Women in 2006, directing it for the next 15 years. During that time she was struck by women’s complaints of environmental degradation, their despairing at the “heaps of toxic waste that had grown up behind their homes”. Meanwhile feminism was being commodified by companies like Missoni, which copied the pink pussy hats knitted, for nothing, by feminist protesters, and sold them for £140 apiece. And by Dove, which promised “real beauty” and inclusivity while making billions of single-use plastic shampoo sachets that, according to Greenpeace, have clogged up sewers and contributed to floods in places like the Philippines (Dove states that it has made an “agenda-setting commitment to tackle the global beauty industry’s plastic waste issue”).

She also saw some feminists who had supported the charity switch their energies to focus solely on British women, who they insisted needed protecting from migrants. No wonder she invokes indigenous scholar and healer Yuria Celidwen’s belief that political journeys must start with grief. But she also draws hope from Holly Archer (not her real name), a victim of grooming, gang-rape and abuse who has set up a project in Shropshire supporting survivors and “refuses to let her story be exploited by those who would use it to drive hatred and division”.

I’d forgotten until she reminded me here that the slide into dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale starts with climate change. In real life, too, women suffer first and most from environmental collapse. Rising sea levels in Bangladesh send women travelling miles further to fetch fresh drinking water. In north-east Syria, the radical women of Rojava – who fought off the extreme misogynist forces of Islamic State and are resisting authoritarianism from the new Syrian government as well as attacks from Turkey – struggle to feed their families because of water scarcity and food shortages. Nevertheless, they are “building something new”.

skip past newsletter promotion

Walter travels there to interview them and finds “the most determined feminists I have ever met”. It’s exhilarating to meet them on these pages too. One of the most joyous moments in the book comes during a conversation with Bahiya Mourad, who set up a mala jin, or women’s house, in 2011. For a while she and her comrades evaded the authorities’ attention because they seemed like harmless old women, but when the government did try to close them down, they beat them off with sticks. Part of their work involves helping women who want to marry against their parents’ wishes, and, says Mourad, “often we end up dancing at their weddings”. In a book that can sometimes feel hopeless, it’s a vital reminder that feminist joy is not about buying a £140 pink pussy hat, but about helping other women – and, maybe one day, celebrating with them when the seemingly impossible has been achieved.

Source link

The post Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter review – hope amid the hopelessness | Natasha Walter appeared first on Book and Author News.

Reader Q&A: ask international correspondent Luke Harding a question now | World news

Tony Ramos — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:46:42 +0000

Luke Harding, author and award-winning foreign correspondent, has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and most recently Ukraine. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s chief writer in Moscow before being expelled by the Kremlin.

","elementId":"47341436-2503-4a5e-86c0-e76eb9474d0d"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement","html":"

Luke has been reporting this week on the Andy Burnham’s renewal of support for Ukraine and Russia’s loudening threats to Britain. He has also recently written in depth about Ukraine’s increasingly successful drone warfare tactics and the aftermath of injuries for Ukrainian soldiers.

","elementId":"10e41136-b0c8-4556-82ed-93374fdf37ff"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement","html":"

Luke will be here at 1pm BST/9am EDT on Tuesday 25 August to answer your questions. Post them below in the comments now. This is your chance to ask him about his career, geopolitics, the current war between Ukraine and Russia, and his latest book Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest which has been described as “an essential guide to brutal Great Power politics and how it came back.”

","elementId":"969d9c32-44e9-4c8a-b4a9-0c2f2551e99e"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement","html":"

Ask a question: log in or sign up here

","elementId":"5d32f7d2-599a-48a9-a863-58e82f271c55"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement","html":"

In the meantime, you can read some of Luke’s recent reporting and a review of his book here (or support the Guardian by buying a copy from our bookshop).

","elementId":"0520eb87-c3bf-4381-9867-277d93503f4b"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement","prefix":"Related: ","text":"Betrayal by Luke Harding review – could Donald Trump be a Russian asset?","elementId":"768d1f62-fee0-4c03-8646-dd631bd8e403","role":"supporting","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/24/betrayal-by-luke-harding-review-is-donald-trump-a-russian-asset"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement","prefix":"Related: ","text":"‘This is where democracy beats totalitarianism’: Ukraine’s drone strike force takes the fight to Russia","elementId":"230db15c-1fc4-45c0-ade8-91b335f639f5","role":"supporting","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/02/this-is-where-democracy-beats-totalitarianism-ukraines-drone-strike-force-takes-the-fight-to-russia"},{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement","prefix":"Related: ","text":"‘They are isolated … they are alone’: Zelenskyy on Russia, Putin’s lies – and fighting back","elementId":"6473ae77-011e-4dce-8797-59135c6a267b","role":"supporting","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/jun/09/volodymyr-zelenskyy-interview-russia-putin-drone-warfare-ukraine"}],"attributes":{"pinned":false,"keyEvent":true,"summary":false},"blockCreatedOn":1787641251000,"blockCreatedOnDisplay":"03.00 EDT","blockLastUpdated":1787602701000,"blockLastUpdatedDisplay":"16.18 EDT","blockFirstPublished":1787641251000,"blockFirstPublishedDisplay":"03.00 EDT","blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone":"03.00","title":"Welcome to the Conversation","contributors":[],"primaryDateLine":"Tue 25 Aug 2026 03.00 EDT","secondaryDateLine":"Last modified on Tue 25 Aug 2026 04.47 EDT"}],"id":"key-events-carousel-mobile","renderingTarget":"Web","serverTime":1787658402849}">

Key events

Welcome to the Conversation

Ask a question: log in or sign up here

In the meantime, you can read some of Luke’s recent reporting and a review of his book here (or support the Guardian by buying a copy from our bookshop).

Source link

The post Reader Q&A: ask international correspondent Luke Harding a question now | World news appeared first on Book and Author News.

The Disappearers by Marlon James review – a scorching exposé of homophobia in Jamaica | Fiction

Tony Ramos — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:34:53 +0000

“A sense of sweep,” replied Marlon James, when asked what moves him most in literature. “Sweep isn’t just about external journeys, but internal as well. It can be over years and decades, or across land and sea.” If that explanation is still hazy, pick up his mighty new novel, which is longlisted for this year’s Booker prize and is tirelessly – sometimes exhaustingly – grand and peripatetic. Mounting a grisly exposé of Jamaican homophobia, this polyphonic 640-page doorstopper is an emotionally bruising narrative that roves “uptown, downtown, ghetto and gully” through Aids-era Kingston with sidetrack excursions to 1950s England and a closing leap to 2000s United States.

The novel’s defining event is a gruesome mob attack on eight queer men who have clandestinely come together to work on bringing John Herbert’s 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, to the stage. The goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter “the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality”. “Because prison,” he explains, “is the ultimate male institution and yet masculine sexualities that could never happen outside in the normal world flourish in there all the time.”

The spunk and sass of these men, their banter and squabbles as they feel each other out and ease into their roles, as well as their fears, insecurities and motivations for doing the play, are relayed by one of the actors: Eddy Porteous, a “white-ish” Belgian Jamaican college student from a well-heeled family. His diary entries over the course of the month preceding the assault make up the novel’s expositional first quarter, illuminating the interplay of class, race and colourism in the experience of Jamaican queerness.

The narrative kicks into gear with the section on the attack. Now we are thrust, chillingly, into the minds of the perpetrators, among whom are a policeman, a self-loathing closet case, a deacon and a reggae singer named Streggeh Don whose hit, Batty Is Not Pussy, is the rallying-cry-cum-soundtrack for the splatterfest. Violence is James’s shtick and a hallmark of his fiction, from torture and sexual abjection in his subversive slavery epic, The Book of Night Women, and gang warfare in his Booker-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, to the near-ceaseless carnage in his ongoing Dark Star fantasy trilogy. But here, far from the glib relish of which James has been accused throughout his writing career, one senses an unequivocal ethical purposefulness. “I think evil is a choice,” one survivor asserts, “and an ongoing one. Even in the midst of committing wickedness there are choices of how wicked one will be, which is made by the minute.” In order to grasp this statement in all its wounded, furious profundity – to see the outsize hate unleashed on these men as deeply volitional – the reader must bear witness not only from within the action, but also from within the consciousness of the perpetrators.

One man has a branch shoved into his anus and dies. Another has both his eyes gouged out. All but Eddy, who had skipped rehearsal on that fateful night, are battered, gashed and maimed. Two of them will later vanish without a trace. Wrestling with survivor’s guilt, Eddy teams up with fellow actor Jordan to try to find them. More so than Eddy, it is Jordan who is the novel’s beating heart. A gleeful, foul-mouthed “sometime prostitute”, animated by the dangerous, liberatory ethos of American author John Rechy’s 1977 book The Sexual Outlaw, which he obsessively reads for affirmation, he is the Jamaican homophobe’s “battymonster” come to life.

Jordan and Eddy’s journeys into the promiscuous gay underground and the dark heart of heterosexual Jamaica are recounted in a series of interview transcripts, as the pair take turns speaking to a journalist from an American media outlet. Their frustrations gather further poignancy within the broader tragedy of the Aids epidemic engulfing Jamaica’s gay community: “This is what Aids is after all, isn’t it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappear. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the fuck you going, piece by piece, until all of you gone … If there is a fourth act it’s when everybody erase your name as if you were never born in the first place. Certainly no Christian church ever christened you.”

The Disappearers is a bleak and uncompromising exploration of rage and survival; of trauma and its afterlife; of the terrible intimacy that binds victims to their perpetrators, and survivors to the dead, as well as revenge’s lure for those who are not given their due. Throughout, the narrative obsesses over the questions of whether meaning can emerge from the devastation of atrocity, and whether the void left by the missing is a mystery to be solved, or a limbo to be helplessly inhabited. What if the disappeared, done with being part of a world bent on eliminating them, didn’t want to be found? Fizzing with filth, snark and venom, the novel hawks and spits at convention, especially the politics of respectability that insists on restraint; it strafes down on homophobia with ruthless abandon. Few books have mapped the beleaguered realities of queer existence with such psychological depth, harrowing realism and searing condemnation.

The formal design, however, is not without flaws. The overlong narrative sags in places, tarrying where it should speed along, and the intertextuality – most obviously the revenge plot’s debt to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – can veer into self-conscious pastiche. While the book’s conversation with the queer canon is richly rewarding (besides Herbert and Rechy, Gide, Genet, Vidal, Wilde, Baldwin and Holleran are some of the visiting spectres), I struggled with the fact that a significant chunk of the action is reported rather than dramatised. As well as the interview transcripts, we have letters from Havelock to a friend; some pivotal moments are thus experienced either at a temporal and affective remove, or inevitably somewhat summarised.

Ultimately, these are redeemable shortcomings in an otherwise remarkable novel. James makes room for the contradictions of queer life, its intimacies, estrangements and hungers, in utterly indelible ways. His prose is a consistent triumph: bitter and hilarious, lyrical, bawdy, pugnacious and scorchingly, ravishingly queer. The Booker judges have described this novel as a “reckoning”; it is incontestably also a haunting.

The Disappearers by Marlon James is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Source link

The post The Disappearers by Marlon James review – a scorching exposé of homophobia in Jamaica | Fiction appeared first on Book and Author News.

Daily Cartoon: Monday, August 24th

Tony Ramos — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:30:43 +0000

A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.

Source link

The post Daily Cartoon: Monday, August 24th appeared first on Book and Author News.