South African Karen Jennings is the only writer published by a small press to make the Booker longlist. A short, thoroughly absorbing book, An Island’s principal action occurs over four days, yet within that timescale Jennings manages to compress the turbulent history of an unnamed African country and its disastrous
Category: Books
Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett – a life in books
Claire-Louise Bennett’s second novel, like her first book, Pond, enacts a quest for quiddity – the syntax that embodies a cast of mind, the phrase that nails a sensation, the narrative structure that feels like life as it is lived or anyway processed. At times the effect is exhausting. Bennett’s
Sarah Ferguson’s Mills & Boon novel edges on to UK bestsellers chart
It’s not quite Bridgerton levels of sales, but Sarah Ferguson’s first venture into the romantic fiction market, Her Heart for a Compass, has nonetheless made its way into the UK bestsellers chart, with just over 1,000 copies sold in the last week. Her Heart for a Compass was published on
The picture book fighting back against Russia’s LGBT+ propaganda law
A month after a Hungarian bookshop chain was fined for selling a children’s story about a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents, the same picture book has been published in Russia – but with an “18+” label on it in deference to the country’s so-called “gay
Inflamed by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel review – modern medicine’s racial divide
It was May 2020, just months after Sars-CoV-2 began ripping through the world, when it emerged that 97% of the British medical staff who had died of the disease were from communities categorised as black, Asian and minority ethnic. News reports pronounced it extraordinary, shocking. Would that staple of press
Bob Woodward’s third book in Trump trilogy to cover handling of pandemic
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s third book about Donald Trump will be called Peril, completing a trilogy begun with Fear and Rage. According to its publisher, it will also include sections on the first months of Joe Biden’s presidency. Woodward rose to fame in the early 1970s, working with Carl
Instagram user accused of capitalising from Ijeoma Oluo’s anti-racist book
The white woman behind an Instagram account with almost three million followers has apologised for the “harm” she caused to bestselling black author Ijeoma Oluo. Oluo’s examination of race in America, So You Want to Talk About Race, was published in 2018, and hit the bestseller charts in the wake
Dutch literary prize ceremony cancelled over winner’s Desi Bouterse comments
Five months ago, Astrid Roemer became the first author from Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America, to win the prestigious Dutch-language literary award the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, and was praised by the judges for her “unconventional, poetic” works. But last week, the organisers announced that a ceremony
The best books about the post-human Earth
We humans have a profound impact on the world around us. Bob Paine, the groundbreaking American ecologist, once described us as a “hyperkeystone” species: our actions affect the lives and habitats of other creatures more than any other species on Earth. So much so, some scientists have adopted the term
Phantom or Fact: A Dialogue in Verse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Phantom or Fact: A Dialogue in Verse AuthorA lovely form there sate beside my bed,And such a feeding calm its presence shed,A tender love so pure from earthly leavenThat I unnethe the fancy might control,’Twas my own spirit newly come from heavenWooing its gentle way into my soul!But ah! the