Kae Tempest’s new novel is dedicated to “you”, the reader. It also comes with a plea: “Be gentle though.” But to whom or what should we be gentle? The book or the writer? Having Spent Life Seeking is Tempest’s second novel, arriving a decade after his first and following a period of considerable personal change, including gender transition. Perhaps inevitably, it is a book full of struggle and soul-searching. It is also painfully earnest: an enervating read with an exhausting intensity that neither relents nor resolves.

The publisher hasn’t helped here, bombastically announcing it as a “heart-breaking, soul-building new novel”. That’s a great deal to live up to, even for someone who established a reputation first as a blazingly fervent spoken-word poetry performer, winning the Ted Hughes award in 2013, and making Mercury prize-nominated albums in 2014 and 2017. But the grandeur of the publisher’s claims also suggests something of the melodramatic register of the book, which is all grand passion, big trauma and heroic self-discovery. What it lacks is any convincing sense of interiority or reflection.

The novel opens with 36-year-old Rothko Taylor, recently released after two decades in prison for a crime yet to be disclosed to us. Living in a van with a stray dog and picking up casual work, Rothko imagines a tentative future in which they might earn enough to “go private … Start on T” (testosterone). For now, they cut a solitary figure, struggling with automated supermarket checkouts and a longing “just to be touched”. Edgecliff, the bleak and bluntly named fictional seaside town in which the book is set, mirrors the novel’s own grim emotional terrain. Here Rothko must contend with their past, most pressingly in the form of Meg, their neglectful and substance-addicted mother, now in a care home with dementia

Tempest structures the novel simply, with a long flashback bridging the past to the present and filling in the backstory. At 15, Rothko struggles with their parents’ acrimonious divorce, uncertainties about their gender and a secret love affair with fellow teenager Dionne. Tempest’s prose is markedly lyrical throughout, as though he were determined to wrest beauty from the jaws of gritty realism. The issue is that his realism never feels real. Take Rothko’s jailtime, which is given thuddingly clunky treatment: “Jail had been a hard place for hard people who had seen hard things.”

But Rothko finds a community, both in jail and in the life they rebuild after it. Jail, like poverty, squalor, addiction and trauma, can be made beautiful, seems to be the suggestion. If Tempest lingers over the “clump of leaves, bird shit and slimy crisp packets” in a broken gutter, it is so that he might later present a counter vision of grace. “People needed beauty,” Rothko’s sister Sarai observes of Rothko, “Especially the ones who’d soaked up more than their share of ugliness. So the rest of us didn’t have to.” The sentiment that suffering might be a comparative economy and beauty its compensation is deeply unsettling. Later, Rothko seems to marvel at the self-harm scars on Dionne’s legs. This is romance for Rothko, but it’s also an uneasy read.

Trauma, of different kinds, is the book’s primary concern. But trauma in itself doesn’t constitute a plot. And it doesn’t follow that cataloguing the traumatic events of a life would be the best way to carry a reader into the experience of it. Part of the problem is that Tempest’s prose so readily slips into verse: fragmentary, sometimes facile. When Rothko descends into addiction, Tempest writes: “Rothko came to and the whole world was carnage. Monsters in the dark sniffing canisters of varnish.” Rather than elevating the prose, the rhymes feel glib and the sentiment vague, shorthand for an unspecified intensity: “They wanted things they couldn’t name; they wanted rest. They wanted change.”

Lines like “Days went by in a daze of Dionne” might work in a song but are mortifying as a sentence. Dionne herself is thinly drawn, a cool girl carrying tarot cards, a Rizla-rolling version of the manic pixie dream girl, tasked with redeeming the hero. Later, Tempest writes that “Rothko escaped their body when they vanished into Dionne’s. Her pleasure was their victory over the world that made them ashamed and never enough.” But here’s the problem. Rothko has no distinguishing qualities of their own other than their gender dysphoria and unhappy childhood. Is a person only the sum of the things that happen to them? And is the solution really as simple as reviving a teenage love affair?

In the end, it is to Dionne that Rothko makes his declaration: “I’m a man.” Tempest marks the moment with a shift in pronoun from “they” to “he”, a gesture that carries genuine emotional weight. If it is difficult to honour Tempest’s request that readers “be gentle” with his book, it is nonetheless clear that this is a novel animated both by his own vulnerability and a wider sense of that among trans men and trans women. And there’s certainly room for new novels to come that might be equal to the task of capturing the complexity of that experience with sensitivity and power.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Kamala Harris will have a memoir out in September on her historic presidential run.

The book is called 107 Days, the length of her abbreviated campaign, and will be published by Simon & Schuster on 23 September.

“Just over a year ago, I launched my campaign for president of the United States,” Harris said in a video announcement on Thursday. “One hundred and seven days traveling the country, fighting for our future – the shortest presidential campaign in modern history. Since leaving office, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those days and with candor and reflection, I’ve written a behind-the-scenes account of that journey. I believe there’s value in sharing what I saw, what I learned and what it will take to move forward.”

Simon & Schuster’s CEO, Jonathan Karp, declined to offer any specifics on what Harris will write about, including her thoughts on questions about Joe Biden’s fitness for office, but said Harris “addresses everything we would want her to address”.

Harris, defeated last November by Republican Donald Trump, ended up heading the Democratic ticket after Biden dropped out last July in the wake of a disastrous debate performance. Harris would have been the first woman and first woman of color to have become president.

She announced on Wednesday that she will not run for California governor in 2026.

Simon & Schuster is calling the book a “page-turning account” with ”surprising and revealing insights”.

“Kamala Harris is a singular American leader,” Karp said in a statement. “107 Days captures the drama of running for president better than just about anything I’ve read. It’s one of the best works of political nonfiction Simon & Schuster has ever published. It’s an eyewitness contribution to history and an extraordinary story.”

Financial terms for 107 Days were not disclosed. In 2019, Penguin Books published Harris’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.

• 107 Days by Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The book criticizing the health insurance industry whose title resembles words etched on to shell casings found at the scene of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week has soared towards the top of the Amazon bestseller list.

Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, is now No 3 on the site’s nonfiction bestseller list. On Tuesday, it reached No 2, CNN noted.

Thompson was gunned down in midtown Manhattan on 4 December by a masked gunman suspected to be Luigi Mangione, 26, who is fighting extradition to New York after his arrest in Pennsylvania. Bullet casings found near the shooting had the words “depose”, “deny” and “defend” written on them in a striking echo of the title.

Delay, Deny, Defend was published in 2010 and authored by Jay Feinman, a specialist in insurance law at Rutgers law school. It exposes the various ways in which insurance companies avoid meeting the promise they make to Americans by failing to pay claims.

“An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims,” an online excerpt of the book says. “If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.”

It is not known whether the suspect has read or had any knowledge of Feinman’s book. Social media entries apparently posted by Mangione discuss his struggles with a rare back condition called spondylolisthesis.

A Goodreads account thought to be held by Mangione reviewed books on back pain including Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.

Feinman has declined to comment on the CEO killing or the words scrawled on the gun casings. A couple of days after the shooting, however, he posted on social media that the paperback of the book was being restocked by Amazon and that bulk orders could be made on the title’s website page.

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Hugo awards organizers reveal thousands spent on fraudulent votes to help one writer win

Jul 23 2024

The prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy writing has revealed that almost 400 votes – about 10% of all votes cast in this year’s awards – were fraudulently paid for to help one finalist win.

The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with “obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics”.

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The prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy writing has revealed that almost 400 votes – about 10% of all votes cast in this year’s awards – were fraudulently paid for to help one finalist win.

The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with “obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics”.

These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were “translations of consecutive numbers”.

The voting pattern was “startlingly and obviously different” to anything the members of the current Hugo adminstration subcommittee had ever seen, and most of the votes favoured one finalist, who the subcommittee called “Finalist A”.

“We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. We are therefore not identifying them,” the subcommittee said.

Only members of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) can nominate works for the Hugos and vote on finalists, which costs a minimum of £45 each year. Based on the Hugo administration subcommittee’s tally, paying for 377 memberships would have cost at least £16,965 (A$33,000, US$22,000).

The Hugo administration subcommittee said they received “a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished”.

The WSFS constitution states that “only natural persons” can vote and that “no person may cast more than one vote on any issue or more than one ballot in any election”.

After investigating, 377 of 3,813 votes were determined to have been cast fraudulently and had been omitted from the final tally, the Hugo administration subcommittee said.

“This decision is not one made lightly, but we are duty bound as the Hugo Administrators to protect the Hugo awards and to act against fraud,” they said.

While the finalist has not been disqualified, they have also not won their category without the invalid votes, the subcommittee added.

“We want to reassure 2024 Hugo voters that the ballots cast were counted fairly,” their statement said. “Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means.”

US science fiction author John Scalzi, who is a Hugo finalist this year, called the statement “a welcome act of transparency”.

“To the person or persons going out of their way to try to screw around with this year’s Hugo: You just threw a whole lot of money into the trash, pal,” he wrote.

Prof Esther MacCallum-Stewart, who is chair of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, where the Hugo winners are announced each year, said she was “dismayed” by the allegations.

“I … absolutely support their decision to preserve the integrity of the awards through the actions that they have taken. These awards are a cornerstone of our convention and represent the pinnacle of achievement in our community,” she said.

In February the Hugo awards made headlines when leaked emails suggested that several authors were excluded from last year’s shortlists after they were flagged as potentially sensitive in China, where last year’s World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, was held.

This year’s Worldcon will be held in Glasgow in August, with the Hugo winners announced at a ceremony on 11 August.

This book club spent 28 years reading “Finnegans Wake,” and now they’re starting again, and they’re not the only ones!

Nov 15 2023

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.

And this November, they’re starting again: “The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends.”

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