Summer is normally thought of as the time for pacy potboilers and brain-soothing page-turners – airport reads that wind up sandy and sunscreen-stained. Not so for Friedrich Merz’s holiday reading list. Germany’s... Read more »
Fiction Fiction Cursed Daughters Oyinkan Braithwaite Repeat a family story often enough, and it becomes a kind of legend – or a curse. The Faloduns at the centre of Cursed Daughters share... Read more »
A one-sitting read is typically the domain of the short story – a form that largely depends on a reader’s pure, unbroken attention. But there is something special about the intensity of... Read more »
Fiction Fiction What We Can Know Ian McEwan McEwan’s future-set new novel describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a... Read more »
Zadie SmithMargaret Busby’s Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century is the record of one woman’s lifelong passion for the literature and life of Africa and its diaspora, wherever she... Read more »
An initiative that aims to widen access to Booker prize-winning authors is set to launch this week, as research finds that more than a third of UK adults find it hard to... 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 »
A “highly original” nonfiction by Melbourne historian Clare Wright, charting the creation of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – a seminal moment in Australia’s history of land rights – has won book of... Read more »
“I don’t know when I read men any more”, the writer Zadie Smith told a literary festival audience on Sunday. “It does happen sometimes, but it’s completely flipped compared to the reading... Read more »