The prophet Ezekiel once claimed to have seen four beasts emerge from a burning cloud, “sparkling like the colour of burnished brass”. Each had wings and four faces: that of a man,... Read more »
It was Ian McGuire’s second novel, The North Water, longlisted for the Booker prize in 2016 and later adapted for television, that established his reputation for savage historical noir. A professor of... Read more »
If you’ve written a successful book based around one big idea, what do you make the next one about? Back in 2009, Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (co-authored with Richard Wilkinson) argued... Read more »
The latest collection by the poet Hollie McNish is dedicated to anyone who has been “blamed, shamed, pressured, tortured, dehumanised, de-mothered over a man-made concept about your own body”. Virgin is a... Read more »
Making the comic novel succeed is a rich, tricky project in our age of desperate, sometimes weirdly eager apocalypticism. Madeline Cash has spotted that a combination of tenderness and satire may be precisely... Read more »
Never knowingly unknowing, Ali Smith pre-empts the most likely criticism of her latest novel, Glyph, when a character says: “I’m just not sure that books that are novels and fiction and so on... Read more »
When Sunwoo and Hana met on Twitter, they were in their 40s and committed bachelorettes. Both raised by the sea in Busan, they studied in Seoul before entering the city’s famously brutal rat... Read more »
The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as... Read more »
Question: why, if almost half of us now use cash only a few times a year, are high-denomination banknotes being printed in increasingly large numbers? In April 2024, the value of all... Read more »