The narrator of Deborah Levy’s witty scherzo of a “fiction” – “novel” isn’t the word for this uncategorisable book – thinks that Gertrude Stein would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them... Read more »
Wayne Koestenbaum has built himself a slow-burn reputation as one of America’s sharpest queer iconoclasts, but the title of his latest novel suggests Netflix-ready realism. Will My Lover, the Rabbi be a... Read more »
While watching University Challenge or Only Connect, the impulse to shout out the answers comes down to a simple “human urge”, says publisher Richard Green. That compulsion to “know useless trivia or... Read more »
Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then,... Read more »
Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates... Read more »
Last night, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, announced a £27.5m package for libraries. It’s the latest in a string of reading-focused government initiatives, the flagship being the education department’s National Year of... Read more »
Leah Williamson, Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson and Richard Osman are among those who have thrown their weight behind a new nationwide push to get people reading for pleasure, as the government and... Read more »
In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, Cora, a millennial mother, craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and... Read more »
Beginning I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to write a first sentence so idiosyncratic, so indelible, so entirely your own that it makes people sit up or reach for... Read more »