The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial... Read more »
Michael Sheen narrates The Rose Field Sorry your browser does not support audio – but you can download here and listen $https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/10/15/The_Guardian_Extract.mp3 She washed herself as well as she could in the... Read more »
Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters – they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he... Read more »
A “very significant” unpublished story by Jack Kerouac described as “a lost chapter of the On the Road saga” has been discovered after languishing in the files of an assassinated Mafia crime... Read more »
According to Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, inspired by Archilochus’s aphorism that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” one set of thinkers dig into a single topic all... 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 »
Margaret Atwood has released a new short story critiquing elected officials for a wide-ranging book ban in the Canadian province of Alberta. The controversial decision to remove books purportedly containing “explicit sexual... Read more »
What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material.... Read more »
To read Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which has won this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction, is to experience an onslaught of often competing emotions. There is awed disbelief at... Read more »