What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason... Read more »
The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking, £20) A second adventure for amateur spy Gabriel Dax, first seen in Boyd’s 2024 novel Gabriel’s Moon. It’s early 1963, and Dax, a travel writer, is... Read more »
Ursula K Le Guin had her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; I have my comfy cardigan theory. What Le Guin proposed is that human culture, novels included, didn’t begin with technologies of harm,... Read more »
The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just... Read more »
When slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1833, it was thought only reasonable that slave-owners should be recompensed for the loss of their property: the British government had to borrow the equivalent... Read more »
48Kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated by the poet, with Graham Liddel, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti and Yasmin Zaher (Tenement, £17.50) This remarkable debut by a 20-year-old Palestinian, born and raised in... Read more »
Domination by Alice Roberts review – a brilliant but cynical history of Christianity | History books
Domination tells the story of how a tiny local cult became one of the greatest cultural and political forces in history. Alice Roberts puts the case that the Roman empire lived on in... Read more »
At the start of Three Days in June, Gail Baines, a 61-year-old teacher, has a meeting with her school head, who informs her she is about to retire. Gail assumes she is... Read more »
In the opening chapters of Zimbabwean author Brian Chikwava’s follow-up to his 2009 debut Harare North, the eponymous teen protagonist is given a pendant by an elder of the family, the irrepressible... Read more »