The world of Sky City never quite settles beneath your feet. The action of Jacqueline Crooks’s second novel unfolds in a recognisable 1990s London, yet everything seems subtly untethered from reality: a... Read more »
The Salt King by by Natasha Pulley (Gollancz, £22)The latest from the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street blends an apocalyptic end-of-the-world tale with folk horror and two slowly developing love... Read more »
If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality... Read more »
The death of poetry – much anticipated, much prematurely mourned – has been put off again, this time by the Odyssey. Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film, sales of Homer’s epic rose 1,400%... Read more »
In 2009, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an essay with the portentous title The Education of a Libertarian, in which he announced: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”... Read more »
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... Read more »
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... Read more »
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... Read more »
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... Read more »