My earliest reading memorySitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not... Read more »
Andalucía is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson’s debut... Read more »
The second novel by South African author Nadia Davids, winner of the 2024 Caine prize, is set in a “small unnamed city in a colonial empire”, shortly after the end of the first... Read more »
Each December, hundreds of thousands of diaspora Nigerians and Ghanaians travel to their ancestral home countries. For many, the draw is the end-of-year party season – better known as “Detty December”, a... Read more »
The more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below... Read more »
The beginning of the books calendar is usually dominated by debuts, but January 2026 sees releases from some of the year’s biggest authors. Known for his surreally bittersweet short stories, George Saunders has... Read more »
The opening sentence of this remarkable novel announces that the reader is in for an intriguing experience. “On the fourteenth day of July 1924, when the tchinovniks of the Ministry of Winter... Read more »
Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the... Read more »
Noopiming, the first of Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s books to be published in the UK, means “in the bush” in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly... Read more »