Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan (Zaffre, £20)Dismissed from his role as a back-room boffin in the British secret service, Major Boothroyd, AKA Q, returns to his market-town roots in Khan’s excellent... Read more »
Hekate, the Greek goddess of magic and the underworld, is the prototypal witch known to many from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where she chastises the weird sisters for their meddling. Along with witchcraft and... Read more »
The complaint that cynics often make about modern art is that most of it looks as though it were made by children. (If your 10-year-old is pulling out crumpled Kandinskys from their... Read more »
Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership.... Read more »
All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, £20)In this thriller from award-winning author Liu, Julia Z wants to leave behind the notoriety she gained as a teenage... Read more »
Baudelaire introduced ordinary objects into poetry – likening the sky to a pan lid – and by doing so revolutionised poetic language. Likewise, Seamus Heaney introduced Northern Irish vernacular into the English... Read more »
At a moment when the world is desperate to comprehend Russia, journalist Julia Ioffe seeks to explain it through the eyes of women, some of them historical figures, some from her own family. The... Read more »
So Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House, £13.99)The title of this final book, sent to her publisher in January 2018, a week before she died, might look ironic,... Read more »
So Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House, £13.99)The title of this final book, sent to her publisher in January 2018, a week before she died, might look ironic,... Read more »