Could the solution to the reading crisis lie in paying people to put down their phones and pick up a book? That’s what one government, at least, is resorting to: this month,... Read more »
Fiction Fiction The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Kiran Desai This Booker-shortlisted novel is about work as much as it is about the relationship between Sunny Bhatia and Sonia Shah, whose families... Read more »
Fiction Fiction Dream Count Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Dream Count is billed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making”. Composed of the interlocking stories of four women, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor... Read more »
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 »