As anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search... Read more »
Missouri Williams’s darkly absurd and wilfully grotesque debut novel, The Doloriad, concerned itself with the aftermath of a world-shattering catastrophe. Her second takes place in what feels like the beginning of one.... Read more »
Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Catch (2025), recently released in paperback, has a bizarre and intriguing premise: twin sisters who were separated at a young age, adopted into different families after their mother’s death,... Read more »
In the last of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles – her epic, engrossing sagas of bucolic life among horse-riding poshos – Rupert Campbell-Black, template-handsome cad turned loving husband, is now (I did the... Read more »
According to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, almost everyone gets sex wrong. Traditionalists tend to exaggerate the natural differences between men and women. Progressives tend to minimise them, and to assume that... Read more »
In the spring of 2024, I am finally able to visit Banishanta, the island in southern Bangladesh that has been haunting my dreams. When I arrive I find it is little more than... Read more »
Malala YousafzaiActivistI have loved going to the theatre ever since I saw my first musical (Matilda in London, when I was 15 years old) – and I love reading about it, too.... Read more »
Fiction Fiction The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Ocean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over... Read more »
Ban Ban’s Bakery by Elena Hiroko Magee, Do Re Mi, £12.99Ban Ban the bunny loves baking with Grandma – but will she be able to turn Dusty Cottage into a bakery of... Read more »