Book reviews and other literary-related musings
The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday. The 13 books are: The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis Switzy by Emma Cline Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman The End of Everything by M. John Continue reading
My Booker Prize predictions list is an annual tradition, although based on my track record for predictions in recent years, I have probably scuppered the chances of my choices below. Any novel originally written in English and published in the Continue reading
Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry is an account of the final days of the author’s father-in-law, David, who died just nine days after receiving a cancer diagnosis in 2022. Perry and her husband Rob nursed David at Continue reading
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans became a word-of-mouth bestseller last year and recently won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is an epistolary novel told entirely through letters, most of which are written over several years by septuagenarian Sybil van Continue reading
Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right by Harry Shukman won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2025. A former journalist and researcher for the campaigning group HOPE not hate, Shukman went undercover Continue reading
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams is an account of the author’s employment at Facebook as a director of global public policy, working closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for six years. Hailing from New Zealand with a professional background Continue reading
Leaving Home by Mark Haddon is the author’s memoir about his parents and growing up in Northampton in the 1970s. It is a lavishly illustrated book Haddon is a talented artist as well as an author which has Continue reading
The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith is a survey of childhood reading from Aesop to J. K. Rowling. With a focus on British children’s literature, Leith examines how ideals of what childhood should look like have shifted over the years Continue reading
As always, I have been keeping an eye on new books coming soon in 2026, despite already having so many other books on my TBR list… In fiction, Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is said to be the Booker Prize-winning author’s Continue reading
The 2025 debut novels which will stay with me are Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell about an emotionally abusive marriage and We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown about three teenage girls growing up in Doncaster. I also thought the Continue reading
Homesick by Peter Apps is a study of the current housing crisis in London. The specific failures that led to the fire at Grenfell Tower are covered in Apps’ excellent book Show Me The Bodies, while Homesick examines the broader Continue reading
The Bookseller of Hay by James Hanning is a biography of Richard Booth, the second-hand bookseller who helped establish Hay-on-Wye as the book town of Wales. To say that Booth, the self-proclaimed King of Hay, was a bit of a Continue reading
Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens sees the expat Englishman tour the 20 arrondissements of the French capital, sampling the local cuisine of each neighbourhood. There are visits to iconic venues such as the famous Les Deux Continue reading
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith is the eighth book in the Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott series. This instalment sees the detective duo investigate the identity of a dismembered corpse in the vault of a silver shop. Decima Mullins Continue reading
It’s rare for me to binge-read multiple books from a series close together, but having devoured the Apple TV series Slow Horses earlier this year, I gulped down the first four books of the Slough House series by Mick Herron Continue reading
First published in 2000, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is the celebrity chef’s memoir of working in restaurants in New York City. In a loose collection of anecdotes, some drawn from magazine articles, Bourdain recounts how he started out as Continue reading
The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize was announced today. The 13 books are: Love Forms by Claire Adam The South by Tash Aw Universality by Natasha Brown One Boat by Jonathan Buckley Flashlight by Susan Choi The Loneliness of Continue reading
It’s that time of year again… I haven’t had much success with my Booker Prize predictions in the last couple of years, but it’s still fun to consider which books might appear on the longlist, due Continue reading
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan won last year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and is a seamless combination of memoir, history, science and ethics. It connects Flanagan’s father’s experience of being a prisoner of war in Japan (which also inspired Continue reading
One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake documents her gastronomic travels cycling 2,300 kilometres around France and sampling all the regional culinary delights the country has to offer. I enjoyed Red Sauce Brown Sauce which saw Cloake travelling Continue reading
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the interconnected stories of four Nigerian women who live in the United States. Chiamaka is a travel writer based in Maryland who reminisces about unsatisfying relationships, her friend Zikora is a lawyer, and Continue reading
Bookish by Lucy Mangan does what every great bibliomemoir should do: it reminded me of lots of books I would like to reread, helped me discover lots of books I now want to read and gave me a new appreciation Continue reading
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld is a collection of 12 short stories by the author of American Wife, Rodham and Romantic Comedy. White Women LOL is a stand-out satire about cancel culture, while Lost But Not Forgotten, the last Continue reading
The Watermark by Sam Mills is a truly wacky and audacious piece of metafiction which tells the story of celebrated reclusive author Augustus Fate who kidnaps Jaime and Rachel so he can trap them in his novel to give more Continue reading
Despite my ever-growing TBR list, I’m always looking ahead at new books due to be published soon, even if I won’t necessarily get round to reading them all this year. All publication dates where known apply to the UK. Continue reading