The poet Grace Nichols has been named the winner of the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize, a £10,000 award that recognises women writers over 60 who broke through at a time when the literary world was less open to them.

Nichols, 76, who was born in Guyana and moved to the UK in 1977, made her name with I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which took the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1983, and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, a collection published the following year. Her poems have been GCSE set texts for decades, and she has written extensively for children as well as adults.

The Pioneer prize was established last year by the then president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), Bernardine Evaristo, who donated the £100,000 she received from the 2025 Women’s prize outstanding contribution award to fund it for 10 years. The award will rotate between forms each year, and this year was given for poetry. The winner of the inaugural Pioneer prize was the novelist, playwright and activist Maureen Duffy, who died in May.

Nichols’ poems draw on Guyanese folk tales, oral tradition, landscape, and on the history of slavery. She was also one of a group of West Indian poets whose work tackled racial tensions during a time of inflammatory immigration debates in Thatcher’s Britain. Her other collections include Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996), which won the Guyana poetry prize, and Startling the Flying Fish (2005). She has also published a novel, Whole of a Morning Sky (1986), as well as books for younger readers including Come on Into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994). Several of those were anthologies she co-edited with her partner, fellow Guyanese poet John Agard.

Ruth Borthwick, the chair of English PEN, who led the judging panel, called Nichols “one of our most important contemporary poets”, who had developed “her own poetic language – an earthy mix of Creole and standard English”.

“Grace showed the way for generations of poets from the diaspora to make the cultural connections between the Caribbean and Britain,” Borthwick said.

Borthwick was joined on the panel by the poet Sarah Howe, who said: “Grace Nichols is a legend, a trailblazer in the truest sense. Her work spans continents and traditions, alive to orality and shapely on the page, light and weighty at once. Her work blends the rhythms and stories of her Caribbean heritage with a unique vision of modern Britain.”

Nichols said she had been surprised to get the call from Borthwick. “I am honoured and delighted to have the RSL Pioneer prize bestowed on me and grateful to poetry for all that it’s given me, as well as to the judges and my parents who made books a part of our lives,” she said.

Judith Palmer, the director of the Poetry Society, also on the judging panel, said Nichols “was probably the first poet who really lifted poetry off the page for me”.

When she established the prize, Evaristo said: “It’s very easy to forget the feminist struggles of the past and the intrepid women who paved the way for successive generations, and it’s important to celebrate our trailblazers while they are still around to enjoy it.”

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Nichols, who is a vice-president of the RSL, received the Queen’s gold medal for poetry in 2021. Her next collection for adults, The Tracks of My Name, will be published on 19 November.

She will be celebrated at an event at the British Library on 1 March 2027.

Sarah J Maas’s long-awaited return to her bestselling romantasy series has smashed UK sales records, with A Court of Splintered Harmony becoming the fastest-selling adult fantasy novel since accurate records began in 1998.

The novel, the sixth in Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (Acotar) series and her first return to it in more than five years, sold 188,914 copies in the UK between publication day on 27 October and 31 October, according to NielsenIQ BookData. That also makes it the fastest-selling hardback novel since Dan Brown’s Inferno, which sold 229,000 copies in its first week in 2013.

“Harry Potter has the record for the highest ever weekly sale for a fantasy novel, but it’s the biggest sale since our records began [in 1998] for an adult fantasy novel,” said Philip Stone of NielsenIQ.

Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm held the previous record, selling 155,141 copies in its opening week in January 2025. According to Maas’s publisher, Bloomsbury, A Court of Splintered Harmony amassed the biggest single week of sales for any adult fiction title in the UK since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 2015.

The US author is one of the most prominent writers of romantasy, the genre blending romance and fantasy that has come to dominate bestseller lists in recent years. Strong sales of romance and fantasy helped UK fiction revenue pass £1bn for the first time in 2024. The genre’s readers are largely young women, and much of its growth has played out on TikTok, where hashtags related to Maas have more than 14bn combined views.

The novel went straight to No 1 in the UK’s overall book chart, Maas’s third time at the top. When she last topped the chart, in January 2024, House of Flame and Shadow, part of her Crescent City series, sold 44,761 copies in its opening week.

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Globally, A Court of Splintered Harmony sold 1.7m copies in preorders and first-day sales, according to Bloomsbury. The figure counts English-language print and ebook editions in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, but not audiobooks or translations. Maas’s global English-language sales across all her series now exceed 100m copies.

Fans turned out in force for the release, with bookshops across the UK hosting parties and opening past midnight. Waterstones alone hosted 60 midnight launches and 80 early openings and release-day parties across its shops.

“As one of our most pre-ordered books of the year, excitement for Splintered Harmony was at fever pitch, and the astounding first week of sales has reflected this,” said Lucy Jakes, the science fiction and fantasy buyer at Waterstones. “It was amazing to see the hype translate into thousands of Sarah J Maas fans gathering in bookshops.”

Acotar is one of the biggest franchises in publishing. The first book, which reimagines Beauty and the Beast, came out in 2015, and its sequels follow Feyre through the faerie realm of Prythian.

The new book is the first part of a four-part story. The next two parts are contained in A Court of Forgotten Melody, out on 12 January.

The magazine writer Jonathan Van Meter profiles very famous people for extremely glossy publications. He was responsible for the notorious 1990 interview in which supermodel Linda Evangelista said she wouldn’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day, and in recent years, he has interviewed Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga for American Vogue. In 2019, he wrote a cover story, also for Vogue, on Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star turned business­woman turned criminal justice activist, and one of the most famous women in the world. In the lengthy acknowledgments to this book, he describes receiving a phonecall from her after the piece had been published. “There’s no better feeling in the world than when someone gets you,” she told him. He replied by telling her that he was going to write a book about her, “whether you like it or not!”

Spoiler alert: she liked it. And the concept underlying the book can be justified: Kim Kardashian really has transformed celebrity culture. Her family, broadcasting their lives for years, came to define contemporary reality television, beginning with Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2007 and continuing to the present day with The Kardashians. She saw the potential in social media and used it to her advantage from its inception. Last year, her clothing line, Skims, was valued at $5bn (£3.75bn). Van Meter notes that despite her ubiquitous presence, there has been “a dearth of well-written profiles and shrewd cultural analysis” about the phenomenon of Kim K.

But what is promised and what is delivered are not exactly the same. Early on, Van Meter references Kant and the academic Timothy Morton, and later, he invokes Joan Didion’s writing on Hollywood. But any attempts at cultural analysis, shrewd or otherwise, quickly fall away in favour of a more traditional in-depth biography, its wheels greased by regular, intimate access to the Kardashians and many of Kim’s closest friends and colleagues.

Van Meter visits his subject often, at her many homes and places of work. They talk over snacks and coffee. Kim may be in her pyjamas or a bathrobe, having just got out of the shower. At one point, she does away with the formality of clothing entirely. “I looked up from my phone and she was entirely naked. Neither of us flinched,” he writes, describing a day spent with her at a photoshoot. This is intended to suggest candour, though inevitably it implies a lack of critical distance. At the end, in the acknowledgements, he thanks her for her “time, but more so, your trust”.

Van Meter notes that Kim does not like to dwell on the bad stuff, nor does she seem particularly inclined towards introspection. What more is there to say about her life that has not already been televised? Ironically, her views on the family’s show may be the most fascinating part of this book. Doing television has been good for them, she says, “because we’re not going to leave an episode unfinished” – by which she means that arguments are almost always resolved, because they have to be, for the shape of the TV narrative. Public and private are one and the same.

At its best, the book does expose some of the Kardashian family’s gothic underbelly. In 1995, Kim’s mother and father found themselves on opposing sides of the OJ Simpson murder trial (Kris Jenner supported her best friend Nicole Brown’s family during the trial, while her ex-husband, the late Robert Kardashian, was on Simpson’s legal team). For a while, Kim’s teenage boyfriend was TJ Jackson, nephew of Michael, whose own family lore is horrifying and unique. Her school days are likened to the movie Clueless, but there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in there, too.

There is some reflection on the sex tape that propelled Kim into the public eye (it has left her with “a lot to prove”, she says). Van Meter offers a pop-psychology analysis of why she seems to gravitate towards “lost boys”, and she talks about her marriage to Kanye West, albeit with respect and restraint. She describes a move away from a more materialistic worldview after being robbed at gunpoint in Paris, in 2016. The book ends with speculation that she might run for political office. “I am so flattered,” she responds, and leaves the prospect open.

There are moments of camp extravagance. One chapter begins, “Did the trouble start with not one, but two boob jobs?” Van Meter namedrops Anna Wintour, Oprah Winfrey and his own tennis coach. But elsewhere, the narrative swoons and fawns. Kim’s private jet is “a shade of nudey grey,” we learn. “Which is so me,” she says. It is also so this book. The Kardashian aura must be strong, because reading this evokes the same sensation as watching their show: it is seductive, hypnotic, but possessed of a sleight of hand that turns everything beige.

Dear BookBrowsers,

For this special backlist issue, we asked reviewers to choose books they find evocative of summer. The resulting titles range from iconic classics to contemporary jewels to those that sparkle somewhere in between.

Tove Jansson’s immersive The Summer Book (published in English translation in 1974) splashes into summer on a Finnish island, capturing the season’s unique qualities through the eyes of a young child and her grandmother. Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022) provides the quintessential summer reading experience via a forbidden romance in the Caribbean, featuring an artist and a celebrity chef, while also exploring beauty and grief. And we take a fresh look at To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf, yet another warm-weather island novel, famous for its stream-of-consciousness depiction of a family’s holidays on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

In legendary poet Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), summer is ever-present, but not so pleasant: the suffocating heat is just one reminder for Esther Greenwood that her magazine internship in 1950s New York City isn’t going quite as she had hoped. Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds (2023), also about a young person at sea, follows Stephen, the London-raised son of Ghanaian immigrants, over three summers as he navigates a difficult relationship with his father and his path in life.

There’s no beach book like a great suspense novel, and Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness (1960) delivers with a cringy tale of ill-advised romantic persistence. Accompanying our review is an article on the phenomenon of “nice guys,” with more examples from fiction.

We hope you enjoy these and additional “summer” reviews and articles, coverage of new paperbacks, previews of August releases, and more—whether at the beach, by the pool, or from the merciful refuge of an air-conditioned environment.

Stay cool, and thanks for being a BookBrowse member!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Laura Kuenssberg always swore she would never write a book. Amid all the vitriol hurled her way, the BBC’s political editor turned presenter has largely kept her counsel. She rarely complained even when she needed security to do her job unobstructed at Labour party conference under Jeremy Corbyn, or had to run the gauntlet of aggressive Brexit protesters outside parliament, or when a creepy unnamed minister tried to inveigle her into his hotel room for what an appalled Kuenssberg concluded was intended to be a threesome. Knowing everything she does is minutely parsed for bias, she keeps her cards close to her chest. Until, apparently, something snapped.

Pay Attention is a muted but heartfelt howl of frustration with politicians “who have looked like an absolute shower for a long time” but also, sotto voce, with voters, who she evidently wishes would occasionally take things more seriously. Having covered Westminster since the late noughties, Kuenssberg brings all that weight of experience to bear in spelling out just how far the abnormal is now becoming normalised in British politics.

Once, she points out, there was a cross-party understanding not to inflame racial tensions at sensitive times; now masked men can roam Belfast seeking foreign-born people to burn from their homes, and still Nigel Farage says they shouldn’t be called far right. The Greens, Tories and Reform all selected candidates for this year’s council elections who had previously expressed startlingly flaky views. The rapid turnover of prime ministers over the last decade isn’t normal either, she argues, but nor was the behaviour causing it – from the boozy loucheness of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street to Keir Starmer securing a whopping great majority but no mandate, having never really made a case for what he actually wanted to do.

This is a serious and earnest book, not a gossipy insider’s tale, focused on the failures of governance that have radicalised what she argues isn’t naturally a radical country. Kuenssberg describes a politics paralysed by fear, with MPs afraid of telling an angry public the hard truths they’ll happily discuss with her once the camera stops running. (Nobody she talks to, apparently, thinks government operates effectively or spends money well.) But there are glimpses too of journalism struggling to hold politicians accountable, in an era of shrinking audience attention spans – Kuenssberg is notably sniffy about fluffy interviews that focus on a politician’s colourful backstory, not their policies – and Trumpian resistance to scrutiny.

She deconstructs the techniques Farage has developed to dodge questions he dislikes: expressing total conviction even when he doesn’t know the facts; turning questions back on his interviewer; and claiming to be persecuted by the media when cornered – an incendiary tactic Corbyn also adopted and which Zack Polanski is beginning to use, though Kuenssberg says at least Polanski has a “swagger and a bluntness” which means he’ll usually answer a straight question. When a politician lashes out at the mainstream media, she argues, pay extra attention to what they’re actually doing: often it’s a distraction tactic.

But she also identifies the weaknesses in mainstream politics that she believes gave Farage his opening. Ten years ago, she argues, it would have sounded “distressing and insane” to say there would soon be mass small boat crossings of the Channel: if that reality has changed, alongside the numbers of legal immigrants arriving and arrangements for housing them, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the public mood has changed, too. For Kuenssberg, it started with a wave of eastern European migration in the 2000s that some communities struggled to absorb, followed by the 2015 exodus of refugees from war-torn Syria and European leaders’ apparent impotence in the face of what she calls a “massive migration crisis”.

Politicians reacted first too slowly then too bombastically, promising to stop the boats and smash the gangs even when that wasn’t realistically possible, and fuelling the idea that immigration was beyond their control. What’s interesting about this argument – with which readers may agree or disagree – is that it is an argument, one of the few times she seemingly feels strongly enough to advance one.

There is a discernible tension here between Kuenssberg’s professional duty as a BBC journalist to remain politically neutral, and the need for a book to say something beyond the bleeding obvious. At times, I wondered if she wouldn’t have been better saving it all for a post-BBC memoir where she could let rip.

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As it is, some readers will be outraged that she isn’t taking a stronger stand against extremism, while others will doubtless think she has outed herself as a moderate centrist merely by pointing out that ideas now advanced by both Reform and the Greens would once have been considered completely off the wall. As Kuenssberg knows better than most, you can’t win – though that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. Sadly, I think she’s right that our politics is neither normal nor healthy, and that saying so in plain English is an important part of holding the line. But it will take more than paying attention, I suspect, to bring sanity back.

Taika Waititi has launched a furious broadside at “critics” following the disastrous commercial performance of Klara and the Sun, his new film adapted from a Kazuo Ishiguro novel.

In a post on social media, Waititi wrote: “This Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics.”

He added: “The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit … Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.”

Pointing to the disparity of the film’s audience and critics’ score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, which currently stands at 74% for the former and 26% (from 90 reviews) for the latter, Waititi also wrote: “I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years. But I do listen to the people.”

Klara and the Sun, which cost a reported $44m (£32.8m) to make, achieved a dismal $701,000 (£523,000) on its first weekend at the North American box office, working out at just under $800 (£596) per theatre from 880 venues. It came in at 16th place, well below other similarly aimed films such as Wicker, which opened with $5.7m in North America from 1471 venues at an average of $3,906 per cinema. In contrast, You Can See Everything, the celebrated documentary about Elizabeth Holmes scored $18.7m on its second weekend and has reached a cumulative total of $63.8m.

In the UK, the film recorded comparable figures to Klara and the Sun’s North American results, with an opening weekend of £176,000 from 368 venues, for an average of £477.

The Guardian’s chief critic Peter Bradshaw described Klara and the Sun as “unbearably mannered” and “unspeakably acted” in a one-star review, adding: “[It] is soft-centred sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humour and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy.” Bradshaw also negatively reviewed Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, calling it a “terrible film … a pointless Hitler-spoofy YA adventure with a 12A certificate, obtusely accentuating little-kid cuteness and optimism amid the quaintly imagined non-horror.”

Other reviewers have been equally negative towards Klara and the Sun: in the Observer, Wendy Ide called it “a thin and cloying thing that strips away any profundity in the source material and replaces it with self-conscious quirkiness”, while the LA Times’ Tim Grierson said: “[Waititi] lacquers the film with a calculated gooeyness that’s stultifying before it becomes downright exasperating”.

Its second weekend at the North American box-office saw Klara and the Sun enter a steep decline, dropping 79% to $145,000 (£108,000) from a similar number of venues.

Of the cohort of experimental novelists whose renown grew in the wake of the 2008 financial crash – names include Deborah Levy, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett – it was Tom McCarthy who first demonstrated the benefit of bypassing orthodox routes to market. When British publishers rejected his 2005 novel, Remainder, about an amnesiac who spends a windfall restaging his past, he released it in a limited edition from a Paris art collective. Three years later, Zadie Smith wrote an essay celebrating it as a path-breaking overthrow of establishment-sanctioned “lyrical realism”. The literary press soon began finding more room for McCarthy, whose regular denunciations of English fiction – not least for its “middlebrow” ignorance of challenging ideas from the continent – did much to shape bookish conversation at the turn of the decade.

If his zeal wasn’t to everyone’s taste – the New Statesman once called him Britain’s “most galling interviewee” – anyone lately stepping into a bookshop might well feel the last laugh belongs to McCarthy. Witness the success of Fitzcarraldo Editions: innovative Europeans are hot property. Risk-rewarding ventures such as the Goldsmiths prize, established in 2013 to spotlight formally daring fiction amid panic about the philistinism of award panels, feel a little less urgent when a novel as inscrutable as M John Harrison’s The End of Everything sits comfortably on this year’s Booker shortlist, a bestseller to boot. When the mainstream and the avant garde are now kissing cousins, where does it leave McCarthy? The Making of Incarnation (2021), a dense, Pynchonesque espionage yarn about motion capture technology, suggested that he saw the Booker-shortlisted success of both 2010’s C and 2015’s Satin Island as a green light to push readers harder. Further evidence for the theory is supplied by his riddling new novel, The Rhyl Poster, another abstruse spy drama, this time set deep inside the polyglot operations of Luxembourg’s Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It’s as if McCarthy – a longtime Berliner who, post-Brexit, holds a Swedish passport – had determined to immerse himself in the minutiae of the institution his native Britain elected to leave.

We’re in the company of a pill-popping jurist, Stanton, scarred by his past as a military geographer with the British army in Iraq. Memories of that time, opaque to the reader, don’t help him at work, where he’s meant to be drafting a landmark opinion on a privacy suit against a data analytics firm. His desire for relief from his various war wounds makes him prey to an approach from a shadowy criminal seeking EU documents in exchange for unapproved painkillers from a lab in Rotterdam – home, handily, to Stanton’s long-distance Dutch-Surinamese girlfriend, one among a catalogue of lovers whose pillow talk greases the story’s cogs.

The ensuing double-dealing zigzag around northern Europe plays out as a genre-curious mashup of trauma plot and heist narrative, steadfastly averse to closure. Suspense derives less from events than from the disorientingly stretchy syntax of McCarthy’s narration, a dry blend of legal lingo and lower-slung idiom, like a lecturer wearing a blazer with Nikes. “Interpretation,” we’re told, isn’t the same thing as “advancing to a conclusion from a set of givens guided by parameters that, fixed, are also given: that’s induction. No: interpretation, understood in its profoundest sense, is the plumb opposite … If law in general is the realm where language shapes the world, the European Court of Justice pimps this logic to the nth.”

The novel’s interest in law, or its “fundamental propensity for repeatability, its driving imperative towards self-duplication”, eventually reveals itself as another iteration of McCarthy’s abiding preoccupation with repetition. Even the most dramatic scene, a revelatory flashback to Stanton’s days in Iraq, is a replay of sorts, evoking Zadie Smith’s observation about the role Remainder gave to a black man’s fatal shooting (experimental or not, she said, “the non-white subject is still the bad conscience of the contemporary novel”).

Remainder remains McCarthy’s best book, its multifunctional concept delivering old-school psychological intrigue while poking fun at literary realism’s mimetic aspirations. Reading The Rhyl Poster, by contrast, is like trying to fill in a crossword using the wrong clues. The endeavour isn’t devoid of quixotic frisson: it’s not unfun to note, for instance, that the defendant in Stanton’s case is named Elrond – like Palantir, a lift from Tolkien – or that the claimant, Kohlhas, described as a “one-man operation”, echoes the wronged justice-seeker Michael Kohlhaas in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella of that name.

Yet these are keys tinkling, not doors unlocked, and while there’s a measure of page-turning urgency in Stanton’s increasingly hallucinatory personal crisis, he’s too plainly a parody of a girl-getting hardman-savant to carry much by way of emotional weight. The mystifying title, poised between enigma and bathos, refers (no spoiler, this) to the protagonist’s half-memory of riding a train in north Wales while watching someone paste up an advert – blank, naturally.

The prank-adjacent vibe hardly subsides once the novel’s 240 pages of high-pressure buildup conclude with the word “begin”. Any takeaway perhaps lies in the acronym of the court at the book’s heart, blinking like a beacon through its pages – CJEU, c’est jeu, a game – and if you don’t get a kick out of that, be sure McCarthy does.

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There’s no humble way to say it: I get a lot of fan mail. Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from passionate and well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. They have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some of them are straightforward enthusiasts while others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off her messages “warm chaos”. Some love the “deadpan genius” of my novels while others admire my nonfiction’s “moral courage”. What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money. They promise to promote my work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities, if only I transfer a few hundred dollars to cover costs.

In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation. Most writers I know are receiving a steady stream of emails like this. The messages are often sophisticated enough to bypass a spam filter and reach our inboxes, leaving us no option but to read them and ask the painful question: would any real, living person feel this strongly about my work? Or, as one writer friend put it, the reason I know they’re fake is because they’ve actually read all my books.

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What makes it worse is that the AIs that help write these scams really have read all our books. Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn in compensation to the thousands of authors whose copyrighted work they’d used to train their AI, Claude. In July, a group of publishers filed a lawsuit against Google for utilising “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history” in order to train their AI, Gemini. So when writers receive these AI-assisted scam messages, we know we are being manipulated by a version of ourselves.

A few months ago, for example, I received a gushing email from Ottessa Moshfegh. The bestselling, Booker-shortlisted author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation – to my mind one of the most potent voices in contemporary fiction – was taking time away from producing her inimitable prose to write me a fan letter. I thanked her for getting in touch. We got chatting and I asked about her work-in-progress. She said that her new novel was “preoccupied with interior life: how emotions register, how they fail to, and what that absence or excess does to identity over time”. I thought we were making a real connection when she said that, really, the best way to understand her work was to explore her Amazon page. Sigh. Never meet your heroes. Other writers have received similar messages from fake Donna Tartt and fake Sally Rooney. It must be strange for the real Moshfegh, Rooney and Tartt to know that their novels have been harvested by tech corporations in order to create the ghost versions of themselves who now haunt the inboxes of their peers.

The correct response to all this is, of course, to simply report the email, block the sender and move on. But there is a part of me that fantasises about dramatically unmasking the scammer, revealing the villain beneath. So when I received an email from the founder of the Berlin Book Club, I decided to see how far I could get. I agreed that I did need help reaching new audiences. I was willing to pay for her connections and expertise. Soon we started discussing payment methods. She wanted me to use CashApp or make a direct bank transfer but I was insistent that I could only send hard cash. We went back and forth for a couple of days. I impressed on her that I had, at that very moment, 500 US dollars in crisp notes in an unmarked envelope and that I lived quite near the post office. She finally relented and gave me a physical address. Neither of us commented on how unusual it was for the founder of the Berlin Book Club to have a postal address in the Philippines. I went on Google Maps and was able to find the street in question, a rural two-lane road with palm trees, a junk shop, an evangelical church and a large building hidden behind high white walls.

The Philippines – along with Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia – is one of the countries most affected by organised crime networks running industrial-scale “scam farms”. Last year, authorities raided a facility in Bamban, north of Manila, freeing nearly 700 people who had been trapped there and forced to work as scammers. Inside the building, it resembled a hybrid between a call centre and a prison, rows upon rows of computers and green screens, and tiny dorms with bunk beds. About half of the workers were Filipino, while the others had been trafficked from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Rwanda, their documentation withheld. The bosses, meanwhile, splashed around in the swimming pool next door. When another nearby compound was raided, they found it had its own brothel, karaoke suite and torture room. Across south-east Asia, these scam compounds are a multi-billion dollar industry, run largely by Chinese crime syndicates who routinely use violence and sexual abuse to keep workers in line. With the enormous sums of stolen money flowing through the industry, some compounds are the size of small towns or, perhaps more accurately, labour camps – with thousands of workers.

The scammers are encouraged to make use of the latest technology, not just generative AI but also face masking apps, so that they can conduct video calls wearing whatever face suits the task. The big focus is on “pig butchering”: long-term romance scams where people are tricked into falling in love with a wealthy, glamorous foreigner who then advises them to invest in fake cryptocurrency. When a large scam compound in Cambodia was seized by the Thai army, they discovered that its facilities resembled a TV studio. There were costumes, wigs and different sets for filming different scams. There was a fake Brazilian police station and a replica Vietnamese bank. Scammers were trained to keep their targets on the hook for months, even years, inventing private and personalised narrative worlds through which they could drain all of the victim’s money. In an interview with the BBC, one former scam compound manager sounded not unlike a novelist when he described the process. “[It’s] all about exploiting emotion,” he said. “You create a dream.”

For my part, I did not send any cash to the Philippines. Instead I shared the details I’d received with the country’s cybercrime agency. Although, in the words of Winston Casio, the spokesman for the presidential anti-organised crime commission in the Philippines, the ongoing problem is that the criminals have “the financial capability to corrupt just about anybody in public office. The amount of money they have is their potent tool against law enforcement.” When authorities shut down the Bamban compound, for example, they discovered that it was being run by Alice Guo, the local mayor. Similarly, the idea that AI companies might go out of their way to halt the criminal misuse of their technology seems just as doubtful – and for exactly the same reason. It’s making them fantastically rich.

All of which is to say that my fantasy of unmasking the villain was just that, a fantasy. At least now, when I receive fake fan mail, I can attempt to understand the probable reality behind the quirky name and upbeat tone. On the other side of the screen, there is someone frightened and far from home, sitting in a sound-insulated booth with a dozen phones splayed out on their desk – while behind them their manager walks by, a taser at his hip.