Can optimism influence events in your life? Does fate smile upon those who see the glass as half full? The science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury believes so. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have... 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 »
In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in... 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 »
History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it’s more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour... 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 »
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate, £9.99)The award-winning Australian writer’s third adult novel begins with a lone woman, Rowan, washed up on a remote island between Tasmania and Antarctica. Shearwater is... 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 »
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell audiobook review – the life and loss of the woman behind the Bard | Books
The jury is still out on the merits of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which arrives in cinemas next month, but there is no arguing with the quality of the source material. Maggie O’Farrell’s... Read more »