My earliest reading memoryWhen I was five and starting school, I would catch a coach from the Oxfordshire village where I lived. Twice a day I read the little metal plaque screwed... Read more »
My Dad Can by Stephen Lightbown, illustrated by Claire Sahara Lemp, Quarto, £7.99Iris’s dad can turn into dinosaurs, unicorns, anything she imagines – though some people see Dad’s wheelchair and believe he... Read more »
Teenage boys are “stuck” reading primary school books such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, while girls their age are moving on to a wider range of novels, according to a new... Read more »
American writer Ben Lerner has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for Transcription, a novel exploring technology and memory. In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Bartlett for The Escape... Read more »
In 1971, the German actor Klaus Kinski performed a theatrical monologue called Jesus Christ Saviour at the Deutschlandhalle arena in Berlin, but things didn’t quite go to plan. A controversial figure in... Read more »
Robert Prevost – now Pope Leo XIV – is set to publish a collection of his writings from the 2000s in English later this year. Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual... Read more »
You could debate what the best American LGBTQ+ book is until the cows come home, but experts at least tend to agree on the first one: 1870’s catchily titled Joseph and His... Read more »
Annie and Vernice (or Niecy, as Annie calls her) are “cradle friends”, brought up in their home town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in 1950s America. The protagonists are defined by their motherlessness and their... Read more »
‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.” So observed Hungarian journalist George Mikes in How to Be an Alien (1946), one of the finest examples of a tradition in which... Read more »