Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams and the late Virginia Giuffre have jointly won the Freedom to Publish prize at this year’s British book awards, marking the first time the award has been shared.

Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, was recognised for Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, her bestselling memoir about her years inside Meta, formerly Facebook. The book makes allegations about the company’s internal culture and practices, including its approach to political influence, China and the wellbeing of teenagers. Meta has disputed the claims.

Giuffre received the award posthumously for Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, which recounts the abuse she said she suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others.

The award, presented by Yulia Navalnaya and supported by the free expression organisation Index on Censorship, was established in 2022 to highlight threats to writers, publishers and booksellers, and to recognise those who resist attempts at censorship.

Speaking at the ceremony, Wynn-Williams used a rare public appearance to warn of the growing influence of wealthy elites over public discourse and institutions.

“We are all living in a world that now, more than ever, is dominated by networks of powerful elites, whose wealth too often puts them above the law,” she said. “As they rewrite the rules, they grow arrogant with entitlement and impunity.”

Wynn-Williams has herself faced legal restrictions since the publication of Careless People. Meta secured a legal order on the eve of publication preventing her from publicly discussing aspects of the book, and she faces fines of $50,000 each time she breaches the order.

Referring to Giuffre’s memoir, Wynn-Williams said: “Virginia understood who silence protected and realised that only truth can protect everyone else.” She added that Giuffre had faced “coordinated suppression efforts, intimidation and litigation” after speaking publicly about Epstein and Maxwell.

“But here’s a strange thing,” Wynn-Williams said. “When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.”

“Virginia spent years exhausted by a battle she should never have had to fight,” she continued. “She did not get the ending her story deserves.”

Mike Harpley, publisher at Pan Macmillan, praised Wynn-Williams’s “astonishing bravery” in writing Careless People.

“She is now facing a considerable personal, legal and financial toll for bringing to light issues of crucial public interest, both here in the UK and internationally,” he said. “It is a breathtaking irony that while her book helped spark a global reckoning for social media, she is unable to take part in the conversation, silenced by a company that claims to champion free speech.”

Giuffre killed herself in April 2025, shortly before the publication of Nobody’s Girl. She began working on the memoir with journalist Amy Wallace in 2020, documenting both the abuse she alleged she suffered and the years she spent battling powerful individuals and institutions. She was a prominent accuser of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who repeatedly and strongly denied the accusations.

Accepting the award through a recorded message, Wallace said: “We worked together for more than four years, and it was the honour of my career … She always wanted this book to reach as many people as possible, and she particularly wanted it to help other survivors of sexual abuse, not just those who suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, but anyone who’s been coerced into a sexual situation, and she’s clearly done that.”

Giuffre’s brother, Sky Roberts, said she had “inspired millions upon millions” by “speaking truth to power”, adding that she showed “an ordinary person can do extraordinary things”.

The Freedom to Publish award has previously been given to authors including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Boris Akunin, whose books were banned in Russia after his criticism of Vladimir Putin.

Jemimah Steinfeld, chief executive of Index on Censorship, said the two books demonstrated how “the rich and powerful use legal pressure to try to silence those with less capital”. “The circumstances are very different and the stories are not morally comparable,” Steinfeld said, “but they share similarities.”

The British Book Awards celebrate authors, publishers and industry professionals across the UK book trade, in association with trade publisher The Bookseller. Elsewhere at this year’s awards, AF Steadman was named author of the year, Philippa Gregory won the fiction prize for Boleyn Traitor, and Florence Knapp took debut fiction book of the year for The Names, a bestselling novel exploring the long-term effects of domestic abuse.

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir documenting her seven years working at Facebook opens, unexpectedly, with a shark attack. The New Zealander was 13 years old and swimming in the sea when the shark bit her torso and shook her from side to side. She lived to tell the tale, but her near-death experience awakened in her a desire to leave the world better than she found it.

Wynn-Williams went on to take a job at Facebook’s public policy department in 2011, having seen the potential of the platform as a global meeting place. But what she found was a senior staff high on power and untroubled by ethical concerns such as privacy or the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation. All were resistant to political interference and dedicated to rapid expansion, no matter the consequences, claims that Meta has called out of date and false. The author also encountered a working culture where employees enjoyed perks but had to be available around the clock – a situation that led to her responding to emails while in labour.

The book, which last year won a British audio award for nonfiction, is narrated by Wynn-Williams, who blends dark humour and astonishment at the outre situations in which she finds herself. There is also an introduction written and read by The Power author Naomi Alderman, who reveals how Meta, the company behind Facebook, gagged Wynn-Williams by using a contractual clause to stop her promoting the book on publication. Alderman adds, sardonically, that “there are people in the world … on whom the normal ideas about values and ethics do not seem to weigh. But like novelists, we can only guess that this is what’s going on. If only we had someone brave enough to tell us what she saw.”

Available via Macmillan, 13hr 26min

Further listening

The Illegals
Shaun Walker, Profile Audio, 14hr 19min
Walker tells the remarkable real-life story of the Russian sleeper agents embedded in the US 20 years after the end of the cold war, whose real identities remained hidden to their friends and neighbours. Read by Paul Thornley.

Atmosphere
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Cornerstone Digital, 9hr 57min
Kristen DiMercurio and Julia Whelan narrate this romantic thriller set against a backdrop of the 1980s space programme in Houston, in which two female Nasa workers find love and jeopardy among the stars.

My earliest reading memory
The headteacher in my village primary school used to recount terrifying Cumbrian ghost tales to the class, which I’m sure was formative. I can also still hear my mum sing-songing rhymes; “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s”. My dad read the Ant and Bee books to me, repeatedly – he’d drive back over a high upland road from work and get home in time for bedtime stories. But my earliest independent reading memory is The Story of Ferdinand by Leaf and Lawson. I loved that bull!

My favourite book growing up
Big books gave me the whirlies so it took a while for them to start landing.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien. I can’t remember exactly when I read it, – 13, maybe. It was a definite boom! moment, finding an original heroine. Ann Burden is a resourceful rural girl who has survived nuclear holocaust and has to outwit a male scientist trying to control her. I felt fear, anger and above all exhilaration, because she has agency and courage; she upends dogma and patriarchy. I’ve just given the novel to my daughter as an “inheritance track” and she loves it.

The writers who changed my mind
Angela Carter and Buchi Emecheta issued powerful lessons about female narratives, creativity and life. How not to be submissive or stereotyped. How reactivity becomes proaction. It’s a fine option for a mother to burst in on horseback and shoot the despotic husband of her daughter through the head. If someone burns your manuscript, exit and write it again.

The book that made me want to be a writer
There’s a long line of poets who taught me to love the dynamism of language. (They still do, Kathleen Jamie not least.) Switching that circuit to fiction, I’d say it was Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. It occupies a beguiling middle ground and isn’t concerned with definitions of form. I’d just graduated with an English degree when I read it and was living in the American south. Though the novel is set in 1900s New Orleans, the settings, atmosphere, music and culture felt live.

The book I came back to
I keep trying Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, because everyone wangs on about it. But it never feels psychologically organic enough, and I’ve never finished it.

The book I reread
Ferdinand the bull, again. Every time there’s some appalling machismo surge or political provocation, it revises the idea of strength. To have that amount of muscle and be a non-combatant – beautiful! In the grownup world, James Salter is my lodestar. He doesn’t lay coats over puddles, politically speaking, which is a kind of truth I appreciate. Sentence by sentence his work is exquisite, incomparable.

The book I could never read again
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Glad to have met Jane, but I seem to remember the book was quite whingey (forgive me, Brontë congregationalists). It led me to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which I gladly return to.

The books I discovered later in life
Wolf Hall (plus II and III). I adored Hilary Mantel’s slim, fierce early works, but have a bit of an aversion to historical figure novels with their pre-baked associative publicity. In the case of Mantel – a titan of originality and an occult reanimator of the dead – this was totally ridiculous. It’s a killer trilogy that has created new metaphysics for historical fiction.

The book I am currently reading
Wolves: Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation by L David Mech and Luigi Boitani. Research for a film script.

My comfort read
For years I’d browse a tattered dictionary of lighthouse codes, which identify the unique pattern of signals of every lighthouse in the world. Don’t ask me why, previous incarnation as a mariner, maybe. These days it’s The Little Book of Humanism by Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson. It contains 2,000 years of wisdom in 250 pages, and a clear message: we can make things better.

Novelist Sarah Perry’s memoir of her late father-in-law, David, chronicles the period from his first signs of illness, when he began to have trouble swallowing, to his diagnosis of oesophageal cancer, to his death at the age of 77 just nine days later.

We first meet David, a retired chemist from Norwich, on a day trip with Perry and her husband in the summer of 2022. The three of them have gone to Great Yarmouth where, seemingly in good health, David gleefully eats four hot doughnuts. She reveals him as an unassuming man who lives in a bungalow, drinks Yorkshire Tea, delights in telling bad jokes, and likes doing sudoku and watching Antiques Roadshow on TV. But right at the start, Perry notes that David’s death was only weeks away. Though his illness was mercifully short, the speed at which it progressed caught his family unawares, leaving precious little time to prepare.

In this moving and sharply observed book, Perry takes the common event that is terminal illness and elevates it to the realms of extraordinary as she recounts the physical and psychological changes in her father-in-law, the ministrations of doctors and carers, and the relentless form-filling. The narrator is the actor Lydia Leonard, whose reading is serious without veering too far into solemnity. David’s death is devastating for those who love him but, in the greater scheme of things, it is by no means unexpected. Perry’s account of his final weeks is required listening to understand an experience that for many feels unfathomable.

Available via Vintage Digital, 5hr 12min

Further listening

Dirty Money
Charlotte Philby, Baskerville, 9hr 59min
A journalist turned private eye and a government investigator join forces in this compelling thriller about power, corruption and exploitation in present-day London. Read by Kirsten Foster and Victoria Fox.

The New Age of Sexism
Laura Bates, Simon & Schuster Audio, 8hr 35min
The activist and author of Everyday Sexism and Men Who Hate Women narrates her investigation into the misogyny coded into AI. Tackling themes including chatbots, deepfake videos and cyber brothels, Bates reveals how AI perpetuates myths and harmful tropes about women.

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Billie Eilish is set to make her big screen acting debut in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.

According to Deadline, the 24-year-old will take on the lead role for Sarah Polley, the writer-director who previously won an Oscar for her Women Talking screenplay. Eilish is reportedly in advanced talks for the part.

Eilish previously acted in 2023 TV series Swarm, co-created by Donald Glover.

“I used to say that I hated acting,” Eilish said in her Saturday Night Live monologue. “But the truth is, when I was little, I loved it! My mom and dad were both actors. So is my brother, Finneas. And it was my dream to be in a movie.”

The film is set to be released by Focus Features in the US with other deals in the works.

The Bell Jar was Plath’s sole novel, released the month before her suicide at the age of 30. It tells of a young female writer dealing with mental illness in the 1950s. “It’s a raw, unsettling book with flashes of brilliance, a roman à clef that’s also a long, tormented footnote to Plath’s tormented poetry,” the Guardian’s Robert McCrum wrote in a 2015 list which named it the 85th best book of all time.

It was adapted into a film in 1979 starring Marilyn Hassett but received negative reviews. Further attempts, with stars including Julia Stiles and Dakota Fanning attached, failed to materialise.

After winning the best adapted screenplay Oscar for Women Talking, Polley had been attached to a live-action remake of Bambi but later left the project. She has since written the screenplay for family drama & Sons.

Polley’s previous films as director included relationship dramas Take This Waltz and Away From Here.

Eilish recently became the first artist ever win the Grammy for song of the year three times. She has also won the best original song Oscar twice for the No Time to Die and Barbie soundtracks.

This year will also see the theatrical release of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft, a 3D concert documentary from James Cameron, recently pushed back to a May release. “We’re refining the cut; dialing in cool, new 3D tech; adding some special behind-the-scenes we know you’ll love,” Cameron wrote on social media.

Arundhati Roy, Sarah Perry and Lea Ypi are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Sixteen authors are in contention to win the £30,000 award, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

The 2026 longlist spans politics, memoir, science, art, history and biography, and includes seven debut authors. Chair of judges and Labour peer Thangam Debbonaire said the longlist was “hopeful”, and represented “women writing excellently on a wide range of subjects, each uncovering something new about our world”.

Among the best-known names on the list is the Booker prize-winning novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy, longlisted for her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, an exploration of identity, motherhood and the making of a writer, which Amit Chaudhuri described as “utterly absorbing” in a Guardian review.

Quick Guide

Women’s prize for nonfiction longlist 2026

Show

British author Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, a meditation on grief, family and faith, centred on the death of her father-in-law, is also longlisted. Writing in the Guardian, Joe Moran called it “gem-like” and “special”, a book that “works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism”.

The academic and author Lea Ypi is nominated for Indignity: A Life Reimagined, which examines her personal family history alongside political upheaval across the Balkans, from the Ottoman empire to the aftermath of communism – a history “brought to life through Ypi’s novelistic style”, Sami Kent wrote in his Guardian review.

History and politics loom large on the list – the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet is recognised for The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a people’s history of Afghanistan told through the shifting fortunes of the InterContinental hotel in the capital. Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the true story of separated twins to illuminate the human consequences of China’s one-child policy, while Jane Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile looks at the history of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which was used as the headquarters of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, during the second world war.

Contemporary social and cultural questions are tackled in works including Lady Hale’s With the Law on Our Side, an insider’s account of how the legal system works and how it may be improved; Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion, exploring British myth and folklore; and Ece Temelkuran’s Nation of Strangers, on exile, migration and belonging. The longlist also includes books on art and science, from Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure, on the health benefits of creativity, to Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees, a study of how trees have shaped ecosystems and human history.

Other longlisted titles include Jenny Evans’s memoir Don’t Let It Break You, Honey, her account of being assaulted by a high-profile figure; Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, exploring creativity and race in the 21st century; Judith Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, a dual biography of Gwen and Augustus John; Deepa Paul’s Ask Me How It Works, an exploration of love and desire in an open marriage; and Grace Spence Green’s To Exist As I Am, a doctor’s reflections on a life-changing spinal injury.

Debbonaire said: “The books on this hopeful longlist are rigorous and researched, lyrical and flowing. They are drawn together by the originality and skill with which they have been written. This reading list carries relevance and truth for the future as well as holding significant value for the present day.”

Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust, said the longlist reflected the importance of hearing a variety of voices. “Reading and hearing a multiplicity of perspectives, experiences and ideas through nonfiction writing is more vital than ever – it is how we make sense of the world, it’s how we learn from the past, challenge injustice, and imagine new futures,” she said.

The creation of the prize was prompted by research which found that only 35.5% of winners across seven major UK nonfiction awards over the previous decade were women.

Last year’s prize went to Dr Rachel Clarke for The Story of a Heart, while the inaugural winner was Naomi Klein for Doppelganger.

The judges will announce a shortlist of six titles on 25 March, with the winner revealed on 11 June. The winning author will receive £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the Charlotte.

Alongside Debbonaire, the judging panel includes Roma Agrawal, engineer, author and broadcaster, Nicola Elliott, founder of NEOM Wellbeing, Nina Stibbe, novelist and memoirist, and Nicola Williams, crown court judge and thriller author.

• To browse all books on the Women’s prize for nonfiction 2026 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Booker-longlisted author Benjamin Wood has won this year’s Nero book award for fiction for his novel Seascraper.

Meanwhile, Claire Lynch won the debut fiction category for A Family Matter, and Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man took the nonfiction prize. Jamila Gavin was awarded the children’s fiction prize for My Soul, A Shining Tree.

The Nero book awards, run by Caffè Nero, were launched in 2023 after Costa Coffee abruptly ended its book awards in June 2022. The prizes aim to point readers “of all ages and interests” towards the most outstanding books published in the UK and Ireland over the past year.

The winners will now compete for the Nero Gold prize, for the overall book of the year, set to be announced in March. Each of the four winning authors receives £5,000, with the overall prize carrying a further £30,000.

The judges called fiction winner Wood’s Seascraper an “utterly immersive read, steeped in atmosphere, that explores what constitutes a well-lived life”. Set on a fictional stretch of the Merseyside coast, the novel follows Thomas, a shrimp fisher living with his mother, whose routines are disrupted by the arrival of a charismatic American stranger promising opportunity.

In his review for the Guardian, Jude Cook praised Wood’s “attentiveness to the prosaic details” of everyday life. “Whether it’s harnessing a horse, cooking a fry-up or tuning a guitar, he transforms the quotidian into the poetic, making the exactitude of each task sing on the page.”

Nonfiction winner Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man is a personal account of the death of her father-in-law after a cancer diagnosis. The judges praised the book as “honest, revealing and generous”, a memoir “rendered with precision and delicacy”, and concluded: “This is a book for everyone.”

In a Guardian review, Joe Moran wrote: “What makes this book gem-like is that it succeeds in conveying the reality of death as this monumental, mythic thing that coexists surreally with the mundane world of council bin collections and neighbours hanging out their washing.”

Claire Lynch won the debut fiction award for A Family Matter, a dual-timeline novel exploring the long-term effects of prejudice and secrecy on a family separated by homophobia in the 1980s. Judges described it as “a delicately written yet powerful story of injustice”, calling it “raw, vivid and ultimately hopeful”. In her review for the Guardian, Joanna Cannon said: “In this small and powerful story, Lynch forces us to stare bigotry in the eye.”

The children’s fiction prize went to Jamila Gavin for My Soul, A Shining Tree, a novel based on the true story of Indian first world war gunner Khudadad Khan, told from four perspectives, including that of a walnut tree. In the Guardian, Imogen Russell Williams described the book as “a superbly poignant and evocative historical novel from a much-loved author”.

The category prizes were judged by panels which featured Sinéad Gleeson, Paterson Joseph and Sharna Jackson among others.

Shortlisted for the fiction award alongside Wood’s Seascraper were Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, and The Two Roberts by Damian Barr. For nonfiction, The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet, Craftland by James Fox, and We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare were put forward alongside Death of an Ordinary Man.

Shortlisted for the debut fiction prize with Lynch were The Expansion Project by Ben Pester, Lush by Rochelle Dowden-Lord, and Season by George Harrison. For the children’s prize, People Like Stars by Patrice Lawrence, Dragonborn by Struan Murray and Shrapnel Boys by Jenny Pearson joined Jamila Gavin on the shortlist.

The four winners will now be considered for the Nero Gold prize by a final judging panel led by Nick Hornby, alongside broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti and screenwriter and novelist Daisy Goodwin. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony in March.

Last year’s Nero Gold prize winner was Guardian long read writer Sophie Elmhirst for Maurice and Maralyn, which won the nonfiction category. Lost in the Garden by Adam S Leslie won the fiction category; Wild Houses by Colin Barrett won the debut fiction category; and The Twelve by Liz Hyder, illustrated by Tom de Freston, won the children’s fiction category. In 2024, Paul Murray won the inaugural Gold prize for The Bee Sting.

• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Penguin Books Ltd, £14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

• Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

My earliest reading memory
Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, aged seven. I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is redeemed and the adults provide exactly the right support when the children mess up.

My favourite book growing up
The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose politics I now find obviously objectionable. I often tell students that what you don’t get is what gets you, and I’m sure the obsession with rugged independence and the repression of foundational violence did me no good, but I liked the landscapes and the combination of domesticity and adventure.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Teenagers are easily led. I saw myself in some of the plain, clever girls of Victorian fiction, reinforcing the 1990s message that cleverness was unattractive and attractiveness was stupid. Young women shouldn’t be allowed to read the mid-century canon until they’ve learned critical thinking; the Beat poets, Updike, Amis et al taught me to see women and the world through the eyes of white men, and also to admire an excellent sentence. I suppose both were useful in their way.

The writer who changed my mind
All books change my mind, that’s what they are for. Recently Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes altered the way I understand much of the world around me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t think it was a book. Before I could write, my party trick was storytelling. Sometimes other parents would call the house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone and admit to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I’d told earlier weren’t true.

The author I came back to
I’ve just rediscovered Barbara Pym. When I first read her, I was so determined not to become a valiantly cheerful and shabby middle-aged English woman of limited means that I didn’t want to know if they had inner lives. I wouldn’t say I’m now particularly cheerful, valiantly or otherwise, but apart from that – well, let’s just say she’s a brilliant novelist and I was wrong.

The book I reread
Most books worth reading are worth rereading. I revisit Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, noticing how their teenaged heroines and wise or bitter older women look different as I age. Other lodestars include Janet Frame’s autobiography, everything written by Miriam Toews, Bill Reid’s essays on art. And we should not forget the books of staying alive either: Meera Sodha’s and Anna Jones’s cookbooks fall open at the right pages and Felix Ford’s and Kate Davies’ knitting books bring happy hours and favourite jumpers.

The book I could never read again
I never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre, and these days I can’t see around the eroticised abuse, not that there isn’t some of that in Jane Eyre too. Exemplary narrative structure all the same.

The book I discovered later in life
Discovering books is like discovering landscapes; they were already there. I love it when writers reach me in translation decades after they were published: Magda Szabo, Alba De Céspedes, Azar Nafisi.

The book I am currently reading
I am a polyamorous reader: Helen Garner’s How to End a Story; Gun-Britt Sundström’s Engagement; Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems.

Christmas nowadays tends to revolve around family, food and a furtive visit from a pot-bellied stranger down the chimney. But in The Dead of Winter, the historian and folklorist Sarah Clegg reveals a lesser known side to the festive season, unearthing unsettling midwinter traditions and stories that fell out of favour in the Victorian age.

Subtitled The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas, the book opens with Clegg embarking on a pre-dawn walk to a graveyard on Christmas Eve. She is recreating an old Swedish tradition called årsgång, or “year walk”, which is said to offer glimpses into the walker’s future along with “shadowy enactments of the burials of anyone who will die in the village this coming year”.

Elsewhere, Clegg tells of horned figures rampaging through the streets in Salzburg on Krampus night; dawn solstice rituals at Stonehenge; and horse’s skulls mounted on sticks in Chepstow, their cloaked carriers engaging in a battle of rhyming insults. There are chilling stories of an Icelandic ogress who kidnaps people and turns them into stew as her Yule cat looks on, and witches who find children who haven’t done their chores, cut open their bellies and stuff them full of straw.

The narrator is Antonia Beamish, who delights in the mischief and menace of these outre seasonal happenings. In the 19th century, Christmas became a more sedate, domestic affair as a twinkly figure based on Saint Nicholas caught the public imagination. But, as Clegg notes, “look a little closer, you’ll find that Christmas teems with monsters”.

Further listening

Night People
How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York
Mark Ronson Penguin Audio, 6hr 56min
The celebrated music producer blends memoir and cultural history as he embarks on a nocturnal journey around his native New York. Ronson documents the city’s thriving club scene where he found his calling as a DJ. Read by the author.
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy, Penguin Audio, 11hr 28min
The author of The God of Small Things reads her memoir about her complicated relationship with her mother, Mary, an avowed feminist who fought for women’s rights but rarely had a kind word for her children.

Halfway through Liars, the story of a new relationship that becomes a marriage, our protagonist, Jane, is asked by a neighbour: “Why are you with him?” It’s a question that has been on the listener’s mind for some time.

Jane’s partner, John, lies about his feelings, his financial status, where he is going and where he has been. He is chaotic, lazy, resentful, entitled and given to getting drunk and spending money he hasn’t got. At the start of their marriage, Jane’s career as a writer and academic is on the up, while John – a visual artist and aspiring film-maker – has hit a professional wall. Time and time again, he insists they move cities for better work opportunities, which soon puts a spanner in his wife’s working life. It comes as no surprise that, after their son is born, Jane is left to do the parenting while her husband absents himself from his responsibilities.

Voice actor Rebecca Lowman is the narrator whose seething, staccato delivery finds a natural home in Sarah Manguso’s quietly livid prose. “My husband asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile,” Jane reflects. “I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.”

But is John solely to blame for the couple’s troubles? As Jane chronicles one slight after another, all the while making excuses for them both, you begin to wonder about her collusion and self-deception in this unhappy setup. Manguso’s ultimate message is that, despite the best intentions, marriage makes liars of us all.

Further listening

Finding My Way Back
Malala Yousafzai, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 56min
The second memoir from the Nobel peace prize-winning activist focuses on the aftermath of her attempted assassination by the Taliban, during which she navigates fame, friendship, first love and studying for a degree at Oxford. Read by the author.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

The Maid’s Secret
Nita Prose, HarperCollins, 11hr 4min
Lauren Ambrose narrates the third novel in Prose’s crime series featuring a sleuthing hotel maid named Molly. After a priceless Fabergé egg goes missing from the Regency Grand Hotel, Molly receives a threat to her life.