Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged policymakers to treat children’s reading as a “right” rather than a parental duty, warning that Britain is failing to understand the emotional and social value of reading, as new research shows a sharp decline in daily shared reading at home.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in his final laureate lecture, The Kids Are Not Alright, the children’s laureate linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media.

“Our children have been at the sharp end of two great crises: Covid, and just as damagingly, austerity,” Cottrell-Boyce said in his lecture. “We can talk all we like about [the importance of] bedtime stories … but what does that mean to a child with no bed? Or no space for a bed?”

He said that this “furniture poverty”, alongside housing insecurity, means that children are unable to build stable routines around reading. “You’re not going to Narnia because you haven’t got a wardrobe,” he said “Your clothes are stored in bin bags ready for the next move.”

New figures from BookTrust, released to coincide with the lecture, show that daily shared reading among families with children aged eight and under has fallen from 60% in 2021 to 49% in 2025. Yet the proportion of children who “like or love reading” has risen from 66% to 80% over the same period, suggesting that enthusiasm for books remains strong.

It comes as the UK celebrates the National Year of Reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates. The campaign includes launching the first Children’s Booker prize, with a judging panel chaired by Cottrell-Boyce. Three children aged 8-12 will be recruited to help adjudicate. The campaign also involves distributing 72,000 books to children in need, and fostering a “national mission” to make reading a daily habit.

Alongside economic pressures, Cottrell-Boyce told the Guardian about the impact of screens and social media on children’s attention. He said concerns about “addictive” tech platforms were now unavoidable, arguing that children’s attention is being captured by systems designed to maximise engagement.

“These kids are working for big tech,” he said. “We all are. But you’re working for someone who doesn’t love you, who is not going to pay you and doesn’t care how many hours you work. It’s a shocking situation we’ve got ourselves into.”

Referring to the growing legal and political scrutiny of technology companies, he added: “These platforms should bear total responsibility. I think these trials are a bit like the big tobacco moment.”

He added that we have failed to communicate what reading offers beyond literacy outcomes. “Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure,” he said.

Despite the scale of the challenges, Cottrell-Boyce said he remains optimistic about children’s reading habits and the work already being done in communities. “Pessimism is a luxury that we can’t afford,” he said. “I do feel optimistic. I’ve met amazing people and seen amazing practice that costs next to nothing.”

Cottrell-Boyce has used his two-year tenure as children’s laureate to promote his Reading Rights campaign, which argues that shared reading should be embedded in early years support, from health visitors to family hubs. The new children’s laureate will be announced in July.

Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then, their marriage in tatters, move away again. Instead of describing the couple directly we glimpse them through the eyes of the people around them, from the village doctor, their charlady and various neighbours, to friends, colleagues and visitors, offering the reader vignettes drawn from varying distances and perspectives. Although it is not mentioned in the book’s jacket copy, the couple in question are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; eight weeks after the period described in the novel, Plath, having returned to London, would take her own life.

During their time in Devon, from 1961–2, Plath completed The Bell Jar, gave birth to a son, Nicholas, at home, and wrote the poems that would be posthumously published as Ariel; Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill, which Plath quickly discovered. Given that the couple’s lives provide the source material for an entire cottage industry, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary. At points, the experience of reading it feels very close to time travel: Yes, you think, as you watch Plath sitting with her daughter Frieda on her lap in the garden, or having her thumb stitched up by the local GP, or glimpse her getting up to write at 4am: that is just how it must have been.

The injured thumb, of course, inspired her poem Cut, and we see her testing out some of its images and metaphors on Dr Webb (“A flap like a hat, / Dead white. / Then that plush”). Here, too, is the camel-coloured suit she described in a letter to her mother, and which can be seen in photos of her taken in autumn 1962: having found nothing at the local ladies’ boutique, Bain has the shop assistant tell her to try Jaeger in Exeter. Here is the concrete floor that stubbornly wouldn’t dry, and the Bendix washing machine Plath was so pleased with; here is her trip to Broadcasting House to record her essay A Comparison for radio. We meet her friends Clarissa Roche, Al Alvarez, and Marvin and Kathy Kane, and glimpse Plath and Hughes’s famously difficult friendship with Dido and William Merwin – including a retelling of the infamous incident in which a pregnant Plath apparently polished off lunch for four people. In Bain’s hands it’s neither thoughtless, selfish nor “Pantagruelian” (Dido’s word), but a mischievous and deliberate act of revenge.

Structuring a novel so that its story is told through multiple narrators presents significant technical difficulties. Not only must each character have a different voice – something Bain largely achieves – but they must possess their own interiority, too, each drawn clearly enough for the reader to remember who they are when they re-encounter them in a subsequent chapter, and through other eyes. To control what each narrator reveals of the novel’s central thread requires the writer to steer a careful path: make the “plot” (Sylvia and Ted’s collapsing marriage) too important to all the characters and the result will feel stagey and overly managed, but make it too peripheral to their lives and all pace and tension are lost.

But on top of these challenges Bain adds another: she tells the story backwards, beginning in December 1962 with Plath and Hughes’s house, Court Green in North Tawton, being packed up after their separate departures, and ending with the two of them in France in July 1961, looking ahead to their move to Devon. Although the reason for this is perhaps understandable – to roll back the events that led so devastatingly to Plath’s death and see how and where the rot crept in; to close with the two of them happy and optimistic – it significantly impacts the pace of the novel, stripping it of forward propulsion, and layers on difficulties for readers already working hard to discern the shape of events through multiple viewpoints. The book might have proved a little more accessible – especially to readers unversed in Plath’s biography – either told forwards through multiple voices, or backwards via a single, omniscient point of view.

Despite this, The Daffodil Days is an astonishing achievement, its prose supple and intelligent and exact. Bain’s research has clearly been exhaustive – not just concerning Plath and Hughes’s lives but matters such as bellringing, surgery, shop work, the making of honey, sound recording for broadcast – yet her findings are given over to the service of her characters, making each of their worlds believable without the smell of the lamp. The pleasure this kind of writing produces is not quite enough to make the book work without some biographical knowledge of its two central characters, but for those readers unfamiliar with Plath’s last months a little online research is not a great deal to ask.

In a 1993 piece for the New Yorker, quoting the critic George Steiner, the great literary journalist Janet Malcolm wrote, “How the child, ‘plump and golden in America’, became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like Lady Lazarus and Daddy and Edge, remains an enigma of literary history.” This ambitious and insightful novel is a very convincing reply.

Michael Sheen narrates The Rose Field

She washed herself as well as she could in the little basin with its lukewarm water, and looked in the mirror dispassionately. The bruises on her face were fading, but she was tanned by the sun, and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose not far off from being actually burnt, so she must find some cream or ointment to deal with that. A broad-brimmed hat would help too.

She spread a very little of the rose salve on her nose and lips, her cheekbones and forehead. Then she sat down and thought about Ionides.

He’d been very helpful so far, but could she trust him any further? This part of the world was completely new to her, whereas Ionides was at home with the languages here, and the customs, and the modes of travel. Could she manage without his guidance? She could probably afford it. She still had most of the gold that Farder Coram had given her. Ionides hadn’t let her down yet, and besides, she liked him.

The man at Marletto’s, this Mustafa Bey whom Bud Schlesinger had recommended. She didn’t know what to do. The alethiometer would have helped her decide, of course; even without the books, and without risking the sickness and disorientation of the new method, she’d have gained something from it; her knowledge of the symbols was much greater than it had been, and just to hold it would have given her thoughts something to focus on. And now it was gone.

But she still had the glass, and the needle. If she didn’t find something safe to keep them in, though, she might not have them for long. The glass was merely a glass (she supposed), but the needle . . . She took it very carefully out of the pocket it was in, and laid it in the centre of a piece of scrap paper, which she folded over and over till the needle couldn’t slip out, and put it in a compartment of her rucksack.

Then she thought of the old gentleman on the train, and the cards he’d given her. She took out the pack and shuffled it and spread the cards face down on the bed beside her. Now what could she do? The alethiometer worked by blending the meanings of three symbols. Should she pick three cards? Or just one? Or what?

She chose one and turned it over. It showed a man behind a barricade trying to defend it from a group of soldiers, against a background of gunfire and bursting shells. She looked at it despondently for a minute or so, and gathered the cards together again.

---

Ionides sprang to his feet as soon as he saw her come downstairs.

‘Miss Silver! Now I am your guide and guardian for the journey to Marletto’s Café. May I ask if you are hoping to see the well-known and respected Mustafa Bey?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘It was a guess purely and entirely. A traveller of your consequence would of course wish to pay her respects to such an important gentleman, and Marletto’s is where he is to be found. It is as good as a headquarters for his multitude of enterprises.’

He held open the hotel door and walked along beside her with the air of a senior courtier accompanying a princess. He looked no different from the ragged and none-too-clean individual who had first appeared outside her hotel room in Seleukeia, but he bore himself with such confidence and brio that Lyra felt herself to be acting a part too, and enjoying the attention of other passersby. Most of those who looked at her were disconcerted, of course, by her lack of a dæmon, but she remembered the woman she’d seen in Amsterdam, strolling along magnificently indifferent to the hostile stares of other people, and she remembered Farder Coram’s advice too, to bear herself like a queen.

‘Mr Ionides,’ she said.

‘I am all ears,’ he declared.

‘From now on my name is Tatiana Iorekova. I am a queen of the witches of Novaya Zemlya. You are a magician from Prague, and you are in my service.’

‘Ah! I completely understand. This is how I shall present you to Mustafa Bey, no?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘And what is my name?’

‘Magister Parathanasius.’

‘Parathanasius. A fine name, which I shall strive to deserve. How should I address you, Queen Tatiana?’

‘Like that. Say Queen Tatiana, may I present His Excellency Mustafa Bey?’

‘Not “Your Majesty”?’

‘No. We witches live plainly and without ceremony. Ah! – Wait here.’ She had noticed something in the window of a dress shop, and went inside. After a minute she came out with a length of narrow scarlet ribbon.

‘That for me or for you?’ said Ionides.

She smiled, which surprised him, and it occurred to her that she couldn’t remember the last time a smile had come to her face. She tied the ribbon around her head, across the middle of her brow, and let the ends fall in front of her right ear.

Ionides watched critically, and said, ‘You permit?’

She nodded, and he adjusted the ribbon slightly.

‘There. Very royal. What my name again?’

‘Parathanasius. Magister. Like Maestro. Master Parathanasius.’

‘From Prague.’

‘That’s right.’

He looked around. The street was busy; it was a late morning in a prosperous cosmopolitan city, and no one knew they were in the presence of a queen and a magician.

‘All right, Queen Tatiana Iorekova,’ he said seriously. ‘You wanted me to guide you to Aleppo. Here we are, and you will soon pay me forty dollars–’

‘Thirty.’

‘As you say. When I take you to Mustafa Bey our contract will expire, not so?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And what then? The whole of Asia is open to you. What is your destination? Will you require a guide to accompany you there?’

She had already made her mind up, but there were formalities and customs to observe.

‘Master Parathanasius, this is not the right place nor the right time. A queen of the witches does not bargain in the street. When I have concluded my business with Mustafa Bey, you and I shall go to another smaller café and discuss the matters you raise over a glass of tea.’

He nodded slowly. His expression was serious, his clothing ragged and dirty, the scar across his face white against the brown skin and the greying stubble. He looked like a beggar. But he stood upright, his body was lean and tense, and his eyes were alive with complicity and, deep inside, amusement.

‘All right, we go to find Mustafa Bey,’ he said. ‘You come with me, Queen Tatiana, and my magic powers find the way.’

He strode along beside her for all the world as if he really was a magician in the service of a queen. Lyra was pleased with her own bearing too. Like panthers, that was the way Farder Coram had described the way witches bore themselves. She found herself thinking something unexpected: she wanted Abdel Ionides to feel proud of her.

He swept imperiously into the entrance of Marletto’s, stopping in mock astonishment only when a white-aproned waiter said a few words in French, sharply, and barred his way.

‘Vous nous prenez pour des MENDIANTS?’ Ionides said in high indignation. ‘Écoutez, espèce d’imbécile. Voici sa majesté la reine Tatiana Iorekova, qui gouverne le royaume entier de Novaya Zemlya, et moi qui suis son sorcier particulier, le gardien de ses finances, le président de conseil de ses affaires d’état, le Maître Parathanasius! Queen Tatiana,’ he went on, turning to Lyra and switching in a moment from arrogant to emollient. ‘I apologise for the ignorance of this low-born rascal. Please forgive him, because now he knows who you are, he will hasten to bring you everything you desire, and conduct us without delay to a corner of this establishment which is fit to receive us. ‘And,’ he added to the waiter, ‘take word to His Excellency Mustafa Bey that Queen Tatiana Iorekova will receive him at once.’

The waiter looked from Ionides to Lyra, from Queen Tatiana to Master Parathanasius. Ionides was bursting with angry pride, and Lyra held herself still and faced down the waiter with a gaze that came from the coldest fastnesses of the northern ice. Privately she was delighted.

The waiter bowed nervously and led the way to a corner shaded by a potted palm whose leaves waved delicately in the breeze from a fan on the ceiling. Ionides held out a chair for her while the waiter hastened away.

‘When you’ve presented him to me, you can go,’ Lyra said quietly. ‘I saw a fountain in the square as we came through. I’ll meet you there in about an hour.’

‘You don’t need interpreter?’

‘I’m sure I can manage. Here he comes.’

Mustafa Bey was a large man in a physical sense, and an imposing one. His wealth was visible in the exquisitely cut cream linen suit, the hand-made shoes, the massive gold watch on his wrist, the golden signet ring on his little finger, the immaculately groomed grey hair; his power was manifest in the way he seemed to carry a field of magnetic force around him, compelling attention, demanding respect, knowing with utter certainty that his every wish would be not only fulfilled, but anticipated. His dæmon was a cheetah. If Lyra had not been a queen, she might even have been intimidated.

Ionides inclined his head briefly and said, ‘Queen Tatiana, may I present His Excellency Mustafa Bey?’

Lyra extended her right hand. The great merchant bent to kiss it, and Lyra responded with a smile.

‘Please join me, Mustafa Bey,’ she said. ‘I know how busy you are. I would be grateful for a few minutes of your time.’

She indicated a chair, and Mustafa Bey sat down. Ionides was giving an order to the waiter, who hurried away, and then Master Parathanasius bowed deeply to Lyra and withdrew. Mustafa Bey still had not said a word.

‘I was advised to consult you,’ Queen Tatiana said, ‘by a learned scholar in Oxford, Doctor Sebastian Makepeace.’

The merchant’s large and profoundly dark eyes widened a fraction of a millimetre. His expression changed from one unreadability to another.

‘And there was a friend I last saw in Smyrna,’ she went on, ‘who said that the one source of all the information I would ever need on my journey was Mustafa Bey, whom I would find in this café. One such recommendation would have been enough to make me come here – two, and I had no choice. Mustafa Bey, I am glad to meet you. Will you take tea with me?’

She could see the waiter hastening to her table with a loaded tray.

‘I would be honoured,’ said the merchant. His voice was unexpectedly light and gentle.

The tea was poured, the pastries were set out, the waiter bowed and left.

Mustafa Bey was not going to start this conversation. He was a busy man, but he was clearly curious, and Lyra was aware that they were being watched by many eyes that were equally interested. She was glad she had not come to him as a petitioner, having to wait to be seen: this table gave her a little enclave in the middle of his territory, like an embassy, where she could command things, to which she could summon him, from which she could dictate the course of their encounter. It also meant that the initiative belonged to her: she must get on with it.

‘As I mentioned, Mustafa Bey,’ she said, ‘I’m on a journey. I want to travel to the desert of Karamakan, and I would like to ask the advice of someone who knows the Silk Roads as well as anyone alive.’

‘My advice would be a single word: Don’t.’

‘I shall bear that in mind, but I won’t take it. I’m determined to go.’

‘What do you think you will find there?’

‘A red building that contains something of immense value.’

‘And what is that? Do you know what is in this red building?’

‘Yes, I believe I do.’

‘And you still want to go there, and put your life in danger, and risk not being able to return?’

‘Yes.’

He sipped the hot tea. Despite his bulk, all his movements were delicate and graceful.

‘I have never been to the red building myself,’ he said, ‘but I know the conditions under which it must be approached. The traveller by land, the dæmon by water. Do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And your dæmon?’

‘The witches of the Arctic have the power of separation. At the moment, my dæmon is attending to an important piece of business somewhere else.’

He nodded, and set a calming hand on the head of his cheetah-dæmon. ‘And what do you need to know about the journey between here and Karamakan?’

‘How long does it take for a camel-train to go that far?’

‘Six months, more or less.’

‘And a traveller alone?’

‘Less time, but more danger.’

‘Danger from what, Mustafa Bey?’

‘Bandits on the ground. And even more from birds in the air. There are no zeppelin routes across these lands for that reason. The birds are immense and ferocious. They command the air almost entirely. Do your people ever fly across Central Asia?’

‘Very seldom.’

‘With good reason. But, Queen Tatiana, you are not telling me the truth.’

Lyra was aware of a deep soft growl, almost too quiet to hear. It was the merchant’s dæmon, whose black-rimmed eyes were staring at her throat.

‘In what way?’ said Lyra. Her skin was prickling.

‘You are not a witch. I have dealt with many witches – please do not interrupt me – and you are not one.’

‘Could you tell at once?’

‘No. I had to listen to you first. Now I am certain. Your name is Lyra Silvertongue.’

• The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three will be published in hardback, trade paperback, ebook and audiobook – narrated by Michael Sheen – on 23 October by David Fickling Books in association with Penguin Random House in the UK, featuring illustrations from Chris Wormell. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

He rose from the slums of Victorian London to become arguably cinema’s first great comic artist, with The Great Dictator and Limelight among his masterpieces.

Now the script of Charlie Chaplin’s unfinished final film is to be published, having been pieced together from drafts, storyboards and sketches, on which he had been working before his death in 1977, at the age of 88.

Titled The Freak, it is a fantasy about “a beautiful creature with wings … a bird with a human body”, as Chaplin wrote of an otherworldly female creature named Sarapha, which has the power to cure illness and bring peace to the world.

The comic genius, who created the Little Tramp with his trademark bowler hat and cane, planned to appear in a cameo role as a startled drunk who watches her fly above him in the London sky over the Houses of Parliament.

The surviving working papers for The Freak are more extensive than for any of Chaplin’s other films. They reveal that he was close to shooting it. They detail everything from scene breakdowns to special effects sessions, including wings for Sarapha. There are also financial projections, minutes of technical meetings and production schedules.

David Robinson, Chaplin’s official biographer who has written the book containing the material, said: “It’s a shame that it wasn’t finished because it could have been a marvellous film.”

For the role of Sarapha, Chaplin had cast his then teenage daughter Victoria, who recalled: “For hours, for weeks, for months, he [Chaplin] studied the movements of birds in flight – the living mechanics of wings. He watched films where men and women soared through the sky. But the techniques back then did not satisfy him. He wanted to find his own way – crafted, personal – a way to translate the sensation of flight on to the screen. I believe he would have found it. But time clipped his wings. Charlie Chaplin never brought his vision to life.”

Sticking Place Books will publish The Freak: The Story of an Unfinished Film this weekend.

Paul Cronin, its British publisher, said Chaplin created a heroine as timeless as the Little Tramp, an outsider: “Chaplin made that very clear in his production notes.”

This is the first time the script has been published in English, in its original form. It had appeared only in Italian in 2020, in a limited run by the Cineteca di Bologna, which has catalogued the entire Chaplin Archive.

Cecilia Cenciarelli of Cineteca di Bologna, who has edited the forthcoming book in a collaboration with the Chaplin family, said The Freak had been largely unknown even to Chaplin scholars: “We found ourselves handling hundreds of pages of this film we’ve never heard anything about and turned to David [Robinson’s] ‘bible’, Chaplin: His Life and Art, for clarification, only to realise that The Freak was barely mentioned.”

Among the papers are casting notes marked “confidential”, listing Robert Vaughn, James Fox and Richard Chamberlain as contenders for the lead role of an English professor who befriends Sarapha after finding her on his roof, injured and unconscious.

In one scene, she tells him that she hates her wings: “I don’t like mystifying and frightening people … I am afraid of everyone and everyone is afraid of me.” In another passage, Chaplin wrote that Sarapha “loved him in spite of the fact that he was without wings”.

In 1969, Chaplin was in London, exploring ways to pull off the flying scenes. There were talks with companies that created flying effects for the stage as well as film special effects experts, including those at Shepperton Studios.

The new book includes an interview with one of the artists, Gerald Larn, who created 150 drawings showing the wings and Victoria in flight. He said: “Charlie was very clear and detailed about what he wanted and what he expected from us … We thought it would be a difficult project, but not impossible … The good thing was that we always got feedback from Charlie.”

Arnold Lozano, the manager of the Chaplin estate, described the forthcoming published script as “the first comprehensive presentation of Chaplin’s last, unfinished film project”. He added: “Drawn from nearly 3,000 pages of Chaplin’s words, photographs and designs, along with his own recorded readings and piano compositions for the score, it reveals The Freak as perhaps his final bequest. Unique within his body of work yet still touched by unmistakable Chaplinesque elements, this publication offers a rare glimpse into one of the most remarkable projects of his 63-year creative life in cinema.”

In August 2021, Britain’s last ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Laurie Bristow, climbed on to a table holding a kitchen knife. He and a member of his security team had a small but important task. They unscrewed a portrait of the queen from the wall. Around them was “incessant gunfire”. Some of it came from heavy calibre weapons. A large TV screen nearby relayed the news on a loop. It was grim. The Taliban were at the gates of Kabul.

From time to time, Bristow recalls, there were great crashes from the roof as soldiers destroyed sensitive equipment. The UK was shutting its embassy and relocating to a military facility inside Kabul airport. Soon, soldiers and diplomats would depart. The US-led campaign in Afghanistan – a 20-year saga of wishful thinking and blunders – was ending in ignominy and farce. And, as Bristow describes in his compelling memoir Kabul: Final Call, with betrayal and human disaster.

The previous week, the Taliban had overrun a series of provincial capitals. Afghanistan’s foreign-backed republic was falling apart. That might have been predicted. In February 2020, Donald Trump announced the US was pulling its forces out. The Biden administration stuck to this decision and gave a deadline of September 2021 for the exit of Nato troops. Afghanistan’s government, many thought, might stagger on until Christmas.

Bristow arrived in Kabul in June 2021, as Afghanistan’s future looked precarious. He understood it might fall to him to shutter the embassy and evacuate staff, as well as Afghans who worked with British forces. What nobody had anticipated was the speed with which the situation unravelled. The Taliban – chased out in 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11 – controlled rural areas and key roads. In nine giddy days they reconquered the entire country.

What went wrong? As Bristow tells it, the west failed because of bad strategy and a loss of will. After the attacks on the twin towers, a military response from the US and its allies was inevitable. Its goal: to exterminate al-Qaeda. As a young reporter, I watched the Taliban’s northern army surrender outside Mazar-i-Sharif. The five-year-old emirate ended in “a wilderness of shimmering desert and telegraph poles”, I wrote in 2001. It was “vanishing into history”.

This prediction turned out to be wrong. After a period in Pakistan’s tribal regions, the Taliban returned. They waged a brutal and increasingly effective insurgency against international and Afghanistan government troops. The conflict cost billions. Meanwhile, George Bush’s administration invaded Iraq. A surge by the next US president, Barack Obama, didn’t bring results. By 2021, the public had lost interest in Afghanistan, seeing it as a for ever war with few benefits.

Washington and London’s mistake, in Bristow’s view, was to seek a military solution to what was a political problem. The international coalition also failed to address the “egregious” behaviour of its Afghan allies. Bristow portrays Afghanistan’s then president, Ashraf Ghani, as an aloof academic, surrounded by toadies. As the Taliban closed in, he gave speeches from his fortified Arg palace about digital governance. Afghanistan’s then defence minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, was more clear-eyed; the Taliban tried to murder him. Overall, Afghanistan’s ministers were a corrupt and predatory bunch, beset by factional squabbles.

Bristow is frank about his frustrations in dealing with Whitehall. Some Afghans qualified for resettlement in the UK. But who exactly should make the cut? And what about dependants? The ambassador said he urged the Home Office and Ministry of Defence to speed up the processing of applications, including from his embassy team. Instead of stepping up, officials accused him of “catastrophising”. “I ignored this,” he writes.

As the situation got worse, Bristow received media requests for interviews. He relayed these to special advisers working for then foreign secretary Dominic Raab. There was no reply. When Kabul fell, Raab was on holiday to Crete. Other senior mandarins were missing. Bristow doesn’t say much about the infamous campaign allegedly involving former prime minister Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, to rescue Afghan cats and dogs. But he notes that “the priority of some in London” was to spare senior figures from “embarrassment”.

Kabul: Final Call is full of glorious details. Bristow was previously ambassador to Moscow. He swapped a 19th-century mansion overlooking the Kremlin for a Barratt Homes-like residence in Kabul. It had a shiny grand piano and a garden with a small lawn and mynah birds. Before flying out, Bristow picked up a flak jacket and helmet. During security alerts, he took cover in a sweaty armoured “wardrobe” and leafed through a back number of the Economist.

In the run-up to Kabul’s fall, there were numerous ominous signs. Rockets thudded into the green zone. The French ambassador sent home his chef. After relocating to the airport, Bristow found himself in a “real-life” version of Apocalypse Now, as desperate Afghans tried to board a plane. Thousands besieged the perimeter. The Baron hotel – used by the UK as an evacuation handling centre – became a chaotic refugee camp. He spoke to Downing Street from a laptop propped up on the bar.

In contrast to his masters in Westminster, Bristow comes across as decent, serious, analytical and quietly heroic: a brave public servant doing a tough job. He pays tribute to the young British soldiers sent to guard the airport’s gates. And to his staff, who had to inform Afghan families they did not qualify for evacuation. “You are told in return that you are condemning them to death,” he recalls. It was a harrowing experience, he writes, that haunted those involved.

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Some hoped the Taliban who seized Kabul in 2021 might be more moderate than their hardline predecessors. This, it turned out, was a delusion. The Afghans, by the Norwegian writer and journalist Åsne Seierstad, tells the story of what happened next, after the last flights carrying Bristow and his US counterparts took off. She traces the lives of three Afghans: a Taliban commander, a young female law student and a prominent women’s rights activist.

Despite earlier assurances, the Taliban closed down girls’ secondary schools, banned women from the workplace and ordered them to cover up. They were forbidden from travelling farther than 45 miles (72kms) without a male guardian.

Seierstad, the bestselling author of The Bookseller of Kabul, gives a heartbreaking account of the first day of school. Senior girls wearing regulation black dresses and white headscarves arrived, keen to learn. They had “expectant faces”. The same morning, the Taliban’s education ministry ordered female secondary schools to remain closed. In some provinces, Taliban fighters stormed classrooms, beating girls with rods and berating them. In 2022, women were banned from university.

It is Afghan women and girls who are paying a terrible price for our missteps. Since the Taliban took power poverty, hunger and infant mortality have soared. Bristow argues we need a “proper reckoning” of why the campaign in Afghanistan ended the way it did. A lack of resolve contributed to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, he thinks. The only “glimmer of light” he sees comes from courageous Afghans who defended their right to live freely and in peace.

Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber (£10.99)

Kabul: Final Call: The Inside Story of the Withdrawal from Afghanistan August 2021 by Laurie Bristow is published by Whittles Publishing (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

In Julia Armfield’s third book the effects of the climate crisis are felt daily. The city in which sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes live has been transformed by endless rain – and in turn its inhabitants have had to transform their existence, living in houses higher and higher up, and travelling via ferry where train lines once ran.

The world is “in its final stages”, Armfield tells us near the start of the book. Yet her characters do not live as though in an emergency. The siblings moan about their jobs, delayed commutes and relationships that are on the rocks. No matter the circumstances, we will always be anchored by life’s mundanities, Armfield seems to say. It’s reassuring.

The sisters aren’t in regular contact, until they are brought together by the death of their father. It’s an occasion about which each of them isn’t sure how to feel. Their dad, Stephen Carmichael (“the man, myth”, Armfield writes, mocking his legacy even before we hear why he was renowned), was an architect. Remembered as a visionary, he designed structures with rising water levels in mind – but only for those who could afford it.

He was an unloving father. At home he played his daughters off against one another, “giving pocket money only to Irene and telling her not to tell Isla” one minute, “referring to Irene as nasty Irene and making her sisters laugh with imitations of her voice and expressions” the next. Now adults, the sisters – from whose perspectives the chapters rotate – know that their dislike of one another stems from their father’s cruelty.

As in her previous novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, and her short-story collection, Salt Slow, Armfield’s writing is evocative yet grounded, blending the mythical with the cavalier. Venice, she writes, was “long gone, of course, even before things really started to slip”. Her imagination is vivid: as the rain worsens, Agnes finds sea anemones growing along the grouting. Neighbours find crustaceans in their gutters.

As Isla, Irene and Agnes go through the motions of their father’s death – organising his funeral, seeing to his will – they have a series of peculiar encounters with strangers. I felt guilty when I realised I had found the final scene, which features cultish violence, more troubling than the reels of pages detailing people losing their homes because of flooding. Climate disaster is devastating, we know, but human-to-human assaults seem far worse. Until we remember that the climate crisis too is human-made – and must be approached with just the same terror.

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