More than 10,000 books were banned in US public schools from 2023 to 2024, according to a report, marking a stark increase over the year before as Republican-led states pass new censorship... Read more »
âWe were elsewhere people,â André Aciman writes in this memoir of the year he spent in Rome in the mid-1960s. Aged 15, he left Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother... Read more »
A “boundary-pushing take on the police procedural” which features a human detective working with an AI sleuth in order to solve a missing persons case has won the coveted Theakston Old Peculier... Read more »
The Irish author Paul Murray has won the inaugural £30,000 Nero Gold prize for The Bee Sting, a comic family saga set in rural Ireland. Murray was announced as the winner at... Read more »
Which were the pivotal years of the past century? An argument could be made for 1929, when the worldwide financial crash ushered in the crisis that led to the rise of Nazism... Read more »
A new literary character has logged on. It’s unclear how long she’s been here; her arrival itself went unnoticed. Instead of speaking, she lurks. Her profile picture is the default “girl” emoji,... Read more »
Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. In the highest-grossing movie of 2023, Barbie, a literal doll, leaves the comforts of Barbieland and ventures into real-world Los Angeles, where she discovers... Read more »
Fiction Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, medieval magical realism from Salman Rushdie and Paul Murray’s Booker-shortlisted tragicomedy – Justine Jordan looks back on the year in fiction. Read all fiction... Read more »
This year’s best books for children address sadness and fear while celebrating love, resilience, hope and joy. In The Big Dreaming by Michael Rosen and Daniel Egnéus (Bloomsbury), two bears are preparing... Read more »