A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins’s life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. There’s the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out on a kitchen worktop which he helped himself to at the age of seven, secreting it into his orange juice, and the beer given to him at scout camp which he drank alone. There’s also his stomach-churning recreation, while on a comedy tour of Australia, of the white russians drunk by the Dude in The Big Lebowski using a gallon of milk, a litre of vodka and a bottle of Kahlua.

As an adult, Robins, who is best known for his shows on Radio X and on BBC5 Live, romanticised pubs, which he saw as places of peacefulness and refuge. He even co-hosted the podcast The Moon Under Water where he invited guests to describe their ideal pub. Robins reveals that what kept him drinking for so long was the lie that he was in control. That he could, on occasion, get through a Dry January convinced him he couldn’t be an addict, although he got a wakeup call when a GP told him to “sort your fucking life out”.

Robins is our narrator and his reading, much like his prose, is heartfelt, darkly funny, sometimes self-lacerating and full of sage advice born from bruising experience. Currently sober, he must now grapple with the depression from which alcohol was shielding him. “I can thank alcohol for trying to step in,” he notes “but remind it that its services are no longer required, that I’ll take it from here.”

Thirst: Twelve Drinks That Changed My Life is available via Penguin Audio, 11hr 36min

Further listening

The Land and Its People
David Sedaris, Little, Brown, 7hr 26min
The latest essay collection from the humorist was recorded live in front of an audience in Massachusetts and features reflections on his late mother, an anti-Trump protest in New Hampshire and the trials of looking after his partner, Hugh, after a hip operation.

The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien, Granta, 13hr 50min
Richard Lam, Athena Karkanis and Scott Turner Schofield are among the narrators of the fourth novel from the Dogs at the Perimeter author. It sees an ailing father and his daughter reflect on their past as they arrive at a remote migratory outpost called “the sea”.

Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and embellishment, claimed he was paid “1.4 million” for his forthcoming memoir detailing his extraordinary backstory.

Arday was dogged by a growing series of questions over his academic work and credentials before he resigned on Wednesday night, saying the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love”.

His resignation came after Cambridge announced it would launch an investigation following “new information” about his qualifications and career.

Despite allegations against Arday, Simon & Schuster said earlier this week it was planning to go ahead with the publication of his memoir Great and Unfortunate Things on 11 August in the US, and 27 August in the UK.

In a previous interview with the Guardian, Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum.

While it is a high figure, publishing sources said it would be plausible if Simon & Schuster US and UK teamed up to buy the book and sought worldwide rights – meaning they could sell the book into other regions as well as the UK and US. After the deal was signed, it was rumoured to be a seven-figure sum.

One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable. They said a book such as Arday’s would normally be expected to sell about 5,000 copies, so with £2 of royalty per copy, that equates to an advance of £10,000, not 1.4 million dollars or pounds.

The book recounts the story of Arday’s life, from being diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay aged three, to speaking his first words “months before starting secondary school”. In it he claims to have learned to read and write aged 18, before ultimately becoming the youngest ever Black professor at Cambridge at 37.

Arday has been at the centre of a media storm since late July, when the Telegraph reported that more than 100 passages of his PhD had similarities to a thesis published six years earlier.

Doubts have been raised about claims Arday has made about prodigious fundraising feats and a Guardian investigation raised questions about his claims to have been targeted by knife-wielding masked intruders and sent a pig’s head.

Cambridge initially came to Arday’s defence, describing the claims as part of a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility”. It said it had passed complaints on to Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday had completed his PhD. LJMU cleared him of plagiarism, but academics said legitimate concerns remained.

On Wednesday, it also emerged that Arday had appeared to have falsely claimed to have published a book titled Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse. While Palgrave Macmillan accepted the book’s proposal, it did not go ahead with publishing it, reported the Telegraph.

One publishing executive said Simon & Schuster’s decision to stand by its author thus far may simply be because “they had a contract, and they’re sticking with the contract”.

If there was a significant advance involved, there may be more motivation on the publisher’s side to “recoup” it, they added.

There have been suggestions that the publisher had to amend elements of Arday’s work. The journalist Benjamin Ryan shared a series of screenshots on social media of different versions of the memoir’s manuscript suggesting that edits had been made to dilute claims related to Arday’s fundraising efforts. Ryan has written pieces on Arday for the Washington Free Beacon, the conservative outlet behind the investigations that led to the Black academic Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard. Simon & Schuster did not respond when asked why these edits were made.

Pulling the book at this point would be a “pretty massive decision”, one publisher said, if only for logistical reasons: Simon & Schuster has “probably printed the book already, probably paid the author, and may have started shipping the book all over the world”, so “actively withdrawing the book now is both extremely difficult and quite expensive”.

In a statement before Arday’s resignation, Simon & Schuster said: “We have worked closely with Professor Jason Arday on Great and Unfortunate Things since acquiring it and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.

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“Great and Unfortunate Things is Arday’s memoir of overcoming remarkable challenges and responding to adversity with resilience. It is told through his own recollections and those of the people closest to him.”

Arday “worked closely with his co-writer, as well as our editorial and legal teams, to carefully research, write and corroborate the narrative”, they added. The book is co-written by Eve Claxton.

In comments reported by the Bookseller in April, Kris Doyle, the nonfiction publisher at Simon & Schuster UK, said: “I can promise you’ve never read a story like this – even the viral news headlines don’t do it justice.”

Doyle acquired rights to publish the book in the UK and Commonwealth, while Dawn Davis, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s 37 Ink imprint in the US, simultaneously acquired world rights. Neither Doyle nor Davis responded to questions over why Simon & Schuster had decided to pursue publication notwithstanding the controversy.

When asked to share information about the book’s fact-checking process, Simon & Schuster said: “We do not comment on our editorial processes.” In the acknowledgements section of the book, Arday credits Iman M’Fah-Traoré with checking the book. The publisher did not respond when asked whether it had contracted Traoré rather than Arday hiring her independently.

Arday is scheduled to speak in September at the Topping bookshop in Edinburgh and at Stroud book festival in November, neither of which responded when asked whether these events would go ahead.

Asked whether he would be speaking anywhere else, Simon & Schuster said they “have some additional events planned but these would all follow in the autumn so not listed as yet”. The US branch of the publisher said no official US tour was planned.

The problem facing Simon & Schuster has echoes of that faced by Penguin following the infamous Salt Path scandal, where Raynor and Moth Winn were accused of fabricating large chunks of their story.

In that case, the next book by Raynor Winn, the fourth in her bestselling series, seems to be indefinitely delayed (it’s currently scheduled for January 2028). There are clear differences between the cases – critics took issue with the accuracy of The Salt Path itself, which was marketed as an “unflinchingly honest” text, while Arday’s most-contested claims do not appear in his book.

Signing a contract for a memoir, writers promise that they have the “right to tell the story and that it’s true”, one British publisher said. Any publishing house was “relying on that warranty”.

When bored, try the following game – I call it “Purr or Roar?”. Take any feline and guess whether it can purr or roar (it cannot do both because purring and roaring require different anatomical structures). Some candidates are easy: any child knows that lions and tigers roar and that a tabby does not. But between the great cats and our pets are numerous other species, from lynxes to panthers, whose anatomy is not so easy to infer. A leopard, for instance? Roar (or growl). The discreet, mountain-dwelling snow leopard? Purr.

The snow leopard is the protagonist of Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi’s first book, a compelling and intimate look at this elusive mountain specialist. An Indian conservationist and mountaineer, Suryawanshi pursues the creature through the Himalayas and Gobi desert. This is a gritty and detailed portrait of an often misunderstood and endangered species in an increasingly hostile, crowded and hot environment.

Suryawanshi grew up in Aurangabad in the Deccan Peninsula – far away from the snow leopard’s habitat – and decided to pursue ecology after reading biologist George Schaller’s The Year of the Gorilla in the city’s public library. He writes of his admiration for western conservationists, mountaineers and explorers – Schaller, Reinhold Messner, and British imperial adventurer Francis Younghusband – and yet he is an Indian writer, writing about the ecology of his own country. As much as his book is about snow leopards, it also asks us to consider their biographers: who is it who gets to tell the story of the nonhuman lives around us?

Despite its name, the snow leopard has little in common with the leopard (its closest living relative is the tiger). And, unlike the leopard, it is adapted to the harsh and rugged terrain of the highest ranges, from India to Russia. It has an absurdly bushy tail, used both as extra limb and voluminous shawl, and large paws which act like snow shoes. What it lacks in power (it does not have a particularly strong bite), it makes up for in agility and guile (snow leopards can chase their prey down steep cliff faces; and have been known to drive horses into deep snow where they can be picked off). They are extremely difficult to spot; Suryawanshi observes that their “ochre-and-dust-colour coat with its irregular rosettes looks exactly like a rock covered with lichens”. Indeed, he muses, they should really be called “rock leopards”.

I have read much about the snow leopard, or rather books by writers searching for some ideal version of them. Suryawanshi’s book is very different, and can almost be read in opposition to the quest narratives of, say, Peter Matthiessen or Sylvain Tesson. Much like a conservationist’s diary, his book is shorn of romance, and recounts the grind of observing and counting snow leopards in remote parts of the world, far away from his wife and young daughter. He wades through snow, sets up camera traps, and tries to defuse tensions with local herders. His snow leopards are part of an ecosystem, just like any other animal; they are hated and loved, as well as being objects of indifference.

According to Suryawanshi, although snow leopards prefer to hunt wild animals, up to 70% of their diet is livestock, a recipe for conflict with local people. He talks to one herder in the Spiti Valley of the Indian Himalayas who nonchalantly relates that he shot a snow leopard after it attacked his goats, and dumped its corpse in a river. Here is no sacred object of veneration, then, but a potential pest, the equivalent of European fox (other locals speak of their fondness for the cats: a community in the village of Kibber ended up adopting and feeding a sick snow leopard, even naming him Rancho after a character in a Bollywood film).

Much of Suryawanshi’s work is dedicated to mediating conflict between the cats and locals. He assists in the design of a livestock enclosure that can deter the claws and ingenuity of a hungry snow leopard; and makes recommendations on schemes to compensate herders whose animals have been killed. Interestingly, he notes that women are the most hostile to snow leopards as they are the ones who look after livestock (and do not necessarily benefit from compensation schemes). One local woman asks: “why don’t you marry one of your snow leopards?”

The most painful section in the book relates to the bitter dispute regarding the The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 2017 decision to downgrade the animal’s from “endangered” to “vulnerable”. Suryawanshi and his colleagues at the Snow Leopard Trust bitterly opposed the move, arguing that the decision was based on flawed science and driven by the political considerations of large NGOs in the west. In his eyes, “racial power dynamics and colonial legacies of conservation and research” were at play. As of today, the snow leopard is still classed as vulnerable.

There is a critique here of the stories that we have told ourselves about the snow leopard, an attempt to wrest it back from literary and metropolitan writers. In one section, Suryawanshi retraces Matthiessen’s steps in Nepal, but it seems as though his heart isn’t really in it. Along the way, he notices the effects of mass tourism, and learns that Nepal’s richest man, who owns an instant noodle company, had sought to build a resort in a remote village for tourists hoping to spot snow leopards. He takes a gentle swipe at Matthiessen: did the American writer ever stop to think about the consequences of mythologising the creature?

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I think it’s a push to blame Matthiessen for the plight of the snow leopard, in the same way that Melville shouldn’t be held accountable for the decline in sperm whales. But Suryawanshi’s point is that stories matter: the snow leopard has become a commodity in the way that Everest has, a mountain to be summited. The effect of this book is a gradual stripping away of mystification, revealing the snow leopard to be fragile and beautiful just like any other inhabitant of high mountain ranges – the pika, the wild yak, the Pallas’s cat – but no less wondrous for it, and no less deserving of our attention and respect.

George RR Martin has opened up about experiencing depression during a “stressful” and “overwhelming” year, as readers continue to await the long-delayed sixth instalment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

The 77-year-old American author, whose fantasy novels shaped and inspired the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, wrote candidly about his recent difficulties in his first personal blog post for almost six months.

“This year has been … stressful, to say the least,” he wrote in a post titled Better Late Than Never. “So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming. Some great things, exciting things. Dreams coming true. But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come.”

He explained that posts published on his website since February had been written by his assistants because he had continued to fall behind despite their help.

Martin, who turns 78 in September, also reflected on ageing; “getting old is no fun”, he wrote, although he added that the year had contained “amazing times” alongside its difficulties.

“I suppose that’s just life. Of course, I knew that. If you’ve read my stories, you know that.”

Among the year’s highlights, Martin noted that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel based on his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, had received nine Emmy nominations, including for outstanding drama series.

His comments come amid continued speculation about The Winds of Winter, the planned sixth and penultimate novel in A Song of Ice and Fire. The book has been in progress since the publication of the fifth instalment, A Dance with Dragons, in 2011, and has become one of the most eagerly awaited novels in modern publishing. No publication date has been announced.

Martin has faced sustained criticism from some readers over the delay, and has previously referred to the book as “the curse of my life”. The Game of Thrones TV show eventually overtook its source material, with its later seasons following a separate narrative that received a mixed response from critics and viewers, especially after its final season in 2019.

In a blog post in May 2025, Martin directly addressed those who believed he had abandoned the series, sarcastically listing the accusations levelled against him: “I will never finish Winds. If I do, I will never finish A Dream of Spring. If I do, it won’t be any good.”

Continuing the charges, he wrote: “I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money.”

But Martin insisted that he remained invested in Westeros and its characters. “I care about them all,” he wrote. “More than you can ever imagine.”

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter in January, Martin said he had completed about 1,100 manuscript pages of The Winds of Winter. He said leaving the series unfinished would feel like “a total failure”, adding: “I do think if I can just get some of these other things off my back, I could finish The Winds of Winter pretty soon … It’s been made clear to me that Winds is the priority, but … I don’t know. Sometimes I’m not in the mood for that.”

Most of us come upon our family’s dysfunctions gradually, like a door that opens a little wider each year. This uncle, you find out, has had an affair; grandma has a hoarding problem. The cremation of the nuclear family illusion is a cornerstone of literature, especially when it’s hastened by one of those unavoidable core gatherings: weddings, births, funerals. But what happens when there was never any illusion to start with; when the story begins in the ashes?

The delight of Brodie Crellin’s accomplished, surprising debut lies in the way it wrestles with this question, and in its depiction of a family that fails to meet any conventional definition of the word. With a cutting eye and wry humour, Crellin finds fantastic power in the story of three maladjusted people reeling in the face of death, whose relationships to one another are endlessly confronting and complex.

There is friendless Patch, riddled with anxiety, who bursts into tears at the memory of the postman’s suicide and falls victim to a terrible haircut. There is Patch’s father, Robin, who is “gay, yes, mostly, but mutable”. And there is Jude, her domineering, malevolently competent cousin, a playwright who “loves to make an entrance”. They’re bound by the newly deceased Mary: Robin’s ex, Patch’s mother, and Jude’s aunt – a woman who “[didn’t] have a problem with gay men” but was lukewarm on lesbians. Orbiting this “isosceles”, as Jude calls it, is Juliette, Jude’s gleefully moneyed mother, and Mel, Mary’s neighbour. Various other characters swing in and out, all fully realised no matter how brief their appearances, my favourite of which was Mary’s poor, forgotten “empath” labrador, Leonard.

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The stage is set, as Jude cruises in from Naples, for a fraught collision of past and present. As the funeral draws closer and tensions simmer, Crellin juggles the minutiae of death – chopping vegetables, arranging memorial photos – with fragmented recollections of messy family history. It’s rare to read a novel that can skip in and out of so many points of view and keep the different styles of narration intact. Yet even with regular flashbacks, A Sense of Occasion feels remarkably natural thanks to Crellin’s light touch, especially in the arch, zippy dialogue. There are shades of classic mid-century stories, particularly Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, and some of the caustic social wit of Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose chronicles, but the boldness feels entirely modern.

It’s a joy, too, to read fiction that understands sex so well, and is neither sentimental nor sleazy. Crellin conveys the importance of sex as a vehicle for each character’s foibles and desires; as a shadowy place where so much can be manipulated and communicated. The book summons up a kaleidoscope of erotic experience across the spectrum, sometimes hot and sometimes ridiculous, including a quasi-incestuous relationship rendered with nuance and consideration.

If the novel leans a little hard on Jude and her mother, Juliette, for its class critiques, it’s easily forgiven on account of just how much fun it is to watch these characters crash into each other, and for the deftly nasty one-liners that they toss out. “Patch lacked the confidence conferred by a private education,” Jude thinks smugly. “But she could also say that Patch was simply less intelligent.” And yet the story never veers into mean-spirited satire, largely thanks to Patch herself, the grief-stricken daughter, who is the heartbeat of the novel. Perennially misunderstood and underestimated – including by her own mother, when she was alive – Patch is awkward but raw, a keen observer of herself and others.

There is immense pleasure and vitality – and ultimately a great deal of tenderness – in A Sense of Occasion’s depiction of flawed, strange people who love badly, and can’t help but get in the way of themselves over and over again. After all, as George Bernard Shaw wrote, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

When Omar Musa found out he had won Australia’s most prestigious prize for fiction, the $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award, he was already on a high. The 42-year-old was on his honeymoon, carefully dodging motorcycles in the Philippines when he got the call.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he told the Guardian, jetlagged and elated after arriving back in Australia three hours earlier. “I’m floating along. Life does lifey things.”

Musa, a novelist, poet and rapper who grew up in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, has won for his second novel Fierceland, a family epic told in lush and extravagant prose. It follows two siblings, Roz and Harun, who, after years living in Sydney and Los Angeles, return home to Malaysian Borneo to contend with the legacy of their late father. Yusuf was a palm oil baron, a self-made man who, in Musa’s words, “wanted to bend history to his own through sheer tyranny of will”.

Musa’s family comes from Malaysian Borneo. His win follows that of Malaysian-born author Siang Lu, who won the Miles Franklin in 2025 for his novel Ghost Cities: “We’re repping pretty hard at the moment,” Musa said.

The Miles Franklin judges praised Fierceland “a tour de force” that “refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.” Musa sees the novel as “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done”, having spent six years writing and rewriting to get its particular vernacular, blending everything from “the rhythms of rap to Malay ghost storytelling”.

“What readers now read is the 21st draft,” he said. “I was grappling with such complex issues and I wanted to do justice to them – what’s going on in Malaysian Borneo with corruption, complicity, logging, power, and colonial history.”

Palm oil plantations in Malaysian Borneo have devastated rainforests and release massive carbon emissions, while also making owners incredibly wealthy due to palm oil use in food, cosmetics and fuels. Musa’s research for Fierceland involved a temporary move to the capital, Kota Kinabalu, where he made trips into the jungle to talk to locals and his family, some of whom worked on palm oil plantations, as he polished his novel.

“I learned way more than I ever imagined about the ways in which I’m very Australian,” Musa said. “But in other ways I really deepened my connection to Malaysian Borneo, and to my origins. And also understood my privilege.” This became stark in surprising ways, like a discussion with a cousin about watching The Simpsons after school as a kid: “I asked if they did that too. And he was like: ‘Well, on the estate there is no electricity from 8 in the morning till 8 at night, so I couldn’t watch cartoons.’”

Fierceland coincided with great highs but also great lows. “I got sober and clean. I met my wife and I got married,” Musa said. “But my best friend also died while I was writing and there were points where I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. Writing about grief after that took on a different resonance.”

Musa found that while there are books about Malaysian Borneo, most are related to its natural history, ecology or role in the second world war. “There is very little fiction. And I feel like it’s a land rich with stories. I hadn’t read any books that fictively grappled with palm oil and logging, and I thought it was a really fascinating, dark and complex world to delve into in fiction.”

“I hope I have cracked the door for other people, especially people born in Sabah or Sarawak, to tell their stories in a bold and innovative way. Because I’m really Aussie and I’m aware that I’ll always be an outsider, to a certain extent.”

While Musa said that he didn’t believe “long-form fiction is what I’m best at”, he added that “it’s what I’m proudest of”.

“I feel like we’re living in a world and a country where there’s often a dearth of empathy and compassion, but fiction is a really radical form of empathy building,” Musa said. “It’s humanising. And that’s no small thing in a country where oftentimes people are so quick to dehumanise or demonise others.”

What is next from Musa? “I’m not sure what the future holds. I’m going to just keep putting poetry out,” he said. “And who knows? I recently took a flamenco class in Spain. Maybe I’ll get good at that.”

In this week’s episode of Writing Latinos, we spoke with bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez about her new novel, Last Night in Brooklyn, a magnificent book about gentrification, attachment to place, upward social and economic mobility, and what Gonzalez describes as the “insuperiority complex” many nonwhite Americans experience in predominantly white spaces. She wrote a 21st-century Great Gatsby set in a majority Black and Brown community in Brooklyn. Last Night in Brooklyn is Gonzalez’s third novel, following the widely acclaimed Anita de Monte Laughs Last and Olga Dies Dreaming. We had a blast talking with Gonzalez, and we hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. Thanks for listening!

Subscribe to Writing Latinos on Apple, Spotify, or Pandora to listen and to be notified when new episodes are released. Our RSS feed is available here.

View a transcript of the episode here. 

In this moving, sometimes grandiloquent grief-memoir-cum-travelogue, Rory MacLean pairs an affinity for new-age thinking with a habit of loftily holding forth (“none of us are created for naught”, “love can but lead to truth”) and a proclivity for arresting one-liners (“I watched gods walk on fire”). In his search for meaning in the five years after his wife’s untimely death from cancer, he shows himself to be both refreshingly broad-minded and unnecessarily crotchety, like a more cantankerous Michael Palin.

MacLean’s work as a travel writer has taken him across the world, whether flying a handbuilt plane over Crete or riding shotgun with a drug warlord in Burma. This is his first book since losing Katrin, for 32 years the “fixed point” in his life, whose final weeks and moments he describes tenderly. Unable to process her death, he turns to travel to seek out “thin places”: áiteanna tanaí in Celtic mythology, where the veil between worlds is porous. Starting in Jerusalem, his quest takes him to more than a dozen sacred locations, including an ashram in India, a Native American community in South Dakota, an “excruciating” Vipassanā retreat in Suffolk and, inevitably, an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru.

You can’t fault his commitment. He takes the alarming decision – mere weeks before the 7 October attacks – to infiltrate an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, hiding in the shadows from IDF patrols, in an attempt to recreate the circumstances under which Jacob (“a traveller like me”) dreamed of a ladder to heaven. In the US, he faces an oncoming tornado, “too transfixed by the unfolding storm” to seek shelter; in Bhutan, he spends two days travelling to a Buddhist festival along a road that is “little more than a narrow ledge hacked into the rock face”.

MacLean’s skills as a travel writer are evident. He brings to life a Herzogian boat journey down a river into the Amazon, “twisting like a serpent towards another world”. He describes a cremation ground in Bhutan in rich, resonant detail, from the “barley burned in a metal basin, its smell said to keep hungry ghosts at bay”, to the throaty chanting of the monks. In South Africa, he consults a sangoma or diviner; to this day, the country has four times more traditional diviners and herbalists than medical doctors. At the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, he witnesses a remarkable ritual involving trance-like dancing and offerings of flesh. The discussions of Victorian spiritualism and the use of AI to bypass grief are thoughtful and well judged.

But there are jarring tonal shifts, from the pompous (“Does sanctity fall from above or is it conditional on social convention, I wondered?”) to the colloquial (“kick the bucket”, “bunkum”). And more than once, the book is let down by outdated language about minority groups (described as “crippled” and “swarthy-skinned”). Do we really need to know whether every woman he encounters is “slender” or “chubby”?

Throughout, MacLean treads the line between credulous and open-minded. Science is invoked occasionally, only to be dismissed as “reductionist” and “pathetic”. Instead, he becomes fixated on numerology, calculating “the maths” of when Katrin will be reincarnated (according to different people he consults, 49 days after her death, or years later, potentially as a dog). He compiles a dossier of evidence that, in his mind, proves “without doubt” that Katrin’s soul lives on: a dream, a sunbeam, a blue ribbon, a friend’s furniture in Mexico being inexplicably rearranged.

In each new location, his soul-searching follows a pattern: initial disappointment, followed by a last-minute breakthrough. Much of the book hinges on him feeling a vague, indefinable presence – a tingling, a shift in the air – undoubtedly profound to him but almost impossible to put into words (“something infinitely subtle … it was there, and more than nothing”), which can be frustrating for the reader. A somewhat belaboured flight metaphor eventually leads him, many figurative and literal air miles later, to the realisation that what matters is the journey, not the destination.

UK poetry sales are on course to reach a record high this year, buoyed by the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

Poetry sales surpassed £8m during the first 30 weeks of 2026, an increase of 13.3% on the same period last year, according to data from market researchers NielsenIQ.

The category is expected to exceed £15m in annual sales for the first time since accurate records began and could reach £17m if its current momentum continues through the autumn.

Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem has accounted for a significant share of this year’s growth after Nolan’s adaptation – starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Anne Hathaway – brought the ancient Greek epic to a new audience. UK print sales of The Odyssey increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period in 2025, after the film’s release in the middle of the month.

Editions of The Odyssey and The Iliad have generated £980,000 in poetry sales so far this year – equivalent to £1.20 of every £10 spent on poetry books in Britain.

Nolan’s adaptation stormed the global box office, taking $264m (£198m) during its opening weekend, marking the director’s best ever opening.

Homer could now challenge the record for the highest annual sales by a poet in the UK. The current benchmark was set by Canadian poet and Instagram sensation Rupi Kaur, whose books, such as 2015 hit Milk and Honey, generated £1.2m through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market in 2017.

The Nolan effect is also being felt in the US. Print sales across all editions of The Odyssey are up 76% so far this year, according to Circana BookScan figures.

But the poetry boom extends well beyond ancient epic. Even when sales of The Odyssey and The Iliad are removed from this year’s and last year’s figures, the category is still up 7.2% and remains on course for its best year. The three years from 2023 to 2025 were the category’s most lucrative on record.

Much of this has been driven by more commercial, social media-friendly poets. Scottish writer Donna Ashworth remains Britain’s bestselling living poet of the decade, with her 2025 collection To the Women selling almost 34,000 copies this year. However some traditionalists have questioned whether her uplifting, aphoristic work is poetry or self-help.

“The poetry sector was already enjoying an upwards trajectory before Chris Nolan tackled The Odyssey, helped in recent years by the popularity of Instapoets, including Rupi Kaur, repositioning the poetry sector from a more academic category into a lifestyle, gift and self-development genre,” said Philip Stone at NielsenIQ.

The year’s breakout poetry bestseller is from the London-based actor and poet Lucas Jones, whose debut collection, I Still Believe in Miracles, is 2026’s bestselling poetry title by value, generating £400,000, according to the Bookseller.

Classicist Emily Wilson’s acclaimed 2017 translation has been the main beneficiary of The Odyssey’s surge in sales.

Wilson herself made headlines last week when she criticised the film, saying “it has nothing convincing to say” and that it “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth”.

In a scathing article for the London Review of Books, she wrote: “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great … The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

She added: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

Audiobook versions of The Odyssey have also experienced renewed interest: Stephen Fry’s reading has entered Spotify’s UK audiobook top 10, while Ian McKellen’s narration has appeared in the equivalent US chart.