![[Valid RSS]](images/valid-rss-rogers.png "Valid RSS")
This is a valid RSS feed.
This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.
<dc:date>2025-05-11T05:04:12Z</dc:date>
^
<dc:language>en-gb</dc:language>
^
<dc:rights>Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. ...
^
<title>The Guardian</title>
^
<link>https://www.theguardian.com</link>
^
line 35, column 6: (36 occurrences) [help]
<dc:date>2025-05-10T08:00:49Z</dc:date>
^
</channel>
^
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Books | The Guardian</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books</link> <description>Latest books news, comment, reviews and analysis from the Guardian</description> <language>en-gb</language> <copyright>Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2025</copyright> <pubDate>Sun, 11 May 2025 05:04:12 GMT</pubDate> <dc:date>2025-05-11T05:04:12Z</dc:date> <dc:language>en-gb</dc:language> <dc:rights>Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2025</dc:rights> <image> <title>The Guardian</title> <url>https://assets.guim.co.uk/images/guardian-logo-rss.c45beb1bafa34b347ac333af2e6fe23f.png</url> <link>https://www.theguardian.com</link> </image> <item> <title>‘Buddhism and Björk help me handle fame’: novelist Ocean Vuong</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/10/buddhism-and-bjork-help-me-handle-fame-novelist-ocean-vuong</link> <description><p>On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made him a literary superstar. Now the Vietnamese American author is exploring his working-class roots in an ambitious follow‑up</p><p>There are three kinds of family, muses the novelist and poet <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/ocean-vuong">Ocean Vuong</a>. There’s the nuclear family, “which often we talk about as the central tenet of American life”. There’s the chosen family, “the pushback”, the community and friendships built by people who have been rejected by their parents, often because of their sexuality or gender identity. And then there’s the family we talk about much less frequently, but spend most of our waking hours within – our colleagues, or what Vuong describes as “the circumstantial family around&nbsp;labour”.</p><p>Vuong’s forthcoming second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, encompasses them all. There’s its 19-year‑old hero Hai’s relationship with his mother, a poor Vietnamese immigrant who believes that he has fulfilled her desperate aspirations for him by going to university, when he has actually gone to rehab. (Vuong, who also struggled with drug addiction, didn’t dare tell his mother when he dropped out of a marketing course at Pace University in New York, before getting on to the English literature course at Brooklyn College&nbsp;that set the course for his life as a writer.) The core of the book is Hai’s relationship with Grazina, an elderly widow from Lithuania who has dementia, and who takes him in when she sees him about to throw himself off a bridge in despair. Then there are the eccentric and richly drawn staff members of HomeMarket, the fast food restaurant in which Hai works, with its manager who is an aspiring wrestler, and customers ranging from the snotty and entitled to the homeless and desperate.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/10/buddhism-and-bjork-help-me-handle-fame-novelist-ocean-vuong">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/ocean-vuong">Ocean Vuong</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Sat, 10 May 2025 08:00:49 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/10/buddhism-and-bjork-help-me-handle-fame-novelist-ocean-vuong</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a8bfc845521bebe29b71c61413003228a99593e7/394_623_4343_2604/master/4343.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a365150694405fe78a9923709154973b"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Anselm Ebulue</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a8bfc845521bebe29b71c61413003228a99593e7/394_623_4343_2604/master/4343.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=425befdf8ab312433860ee17d2308398"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Anselm Ebulue</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Alex Needham</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-10T08:00:49Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Channing Tatum and Pedro Pascal write poems for Canadian musician Mustafa’s book</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/channing-tatum-and-pedro-pascal-write-poems-for-canadian-musician-mustafas-book</link> <description><p>Actors contribute to the poet and singer’s anthology exploring ceremony, loss and worship</p><p>Actors Channing Tatum and Pedro Pascal have written poems for a new anthology curated by Canadian musician and poet Mustafa that also includes contributions by the writers George Saunders, Max Porter and Hanif Abdurraqib.</p><p>The book, titled Nour, explores themes of ceremony, loss and worship. “You told me God wasn’t real/ as we sat in the water in the dark that night/ I couldn’t see your eyes but I could feel the anger/ in the water”, opens Tatum’s poem, extracted below along with Pascal’s.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/channing-tatum-and-pedro-pascal-write-poems-for-canadian-musician-mustafas-book">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/poetry">Poetry</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 19:55:54 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/channing-tatum-and-pedro-pascal-write-poems-for-canadian-musician-mustafas-book</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f9a9f833ba87d80a851327246fa6ef84e3ba8adf/0_0_5000_4000/master/5000.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=460e63fabe55828955a041904327322c"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Composite: Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f9a9f833ba87d80a851327246fa6ef84e3ba8adf/0_0_5000_4000/master/5000.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=daa2a97e44edc7e051815e579de72582"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Composite: Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Ella Creamer</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-09T19:55:54Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Willkommen, bienvenue! New festival celebrates translated fiction from Cameroon to Slovakia as sales boom</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/translated-by-bristol-festival-literature-translation-translators</link> <description><p>Co-organised by translator Polly Barton, Translated By, Bristol will feature conversations between writers and their translators, plus a ‘translation duel’</p><p>A new festival of translated literature is being launched in Bristol next week amid a sales boom in translated fiction in the UK.</p><p><a href="https://translatedbybristol.com/programme/">Translated By, Bristol</a> is the brainchild of Polly Barton, author and translator of the award-winning <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/10/butter-by-asako-yuzuki-review-novel-konkatsu-killer-kanae-kijima">Butter by Asako Yuzuki</a>, and Tom Robinson, owner of <a href="https://gloucesterroadbooks.com/">Gloucester Road Books</a>, which is organising the festival alongside Barton and another independent Bristol bookshop, <a href="https://storysmithbooks.com/">Storysmith</a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/translated-by-bristol-festival-literature-translation-translators">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/literary-festivals">Literary festivals</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction-in-translation">Fiction in translation</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/publishing">Publishing</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/bristol">Bristol</category> <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 09:49:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/translated-by-bristol-festival-literature-translation-translators</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5901ed914fe2066db314add3c0bdadb3fb3a98e5/0_0_4320_3456/master/4320.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=999d6fb5160254b1e89962b0a6fdcd30"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Emily Ross</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5901ed914fe2066db314add3c0bdadb3fb3a98e5/0_0_4320_3456/master/4320.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d82727f0cce6dcbda94a4da2c12e9ee5"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Emily Ross</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Ella Creamer</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-09T09:49:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Gunk by Saba Sams review – boozy nights and baby love</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/gunk-by-saba-sams-review-boozy-nights-and-baby-love</link> <description><p>The Send Nudes author’s follow-up conveys a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family</p><p>To be selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/15/send-nudes-by-saba-sams-review-sex-and-solitude">Send Nudes</a>; one of the stories, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/04/saba-sams-wins-bbc-national-short-story-award-for-transportive-tale">Blue 4eva</a>, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It’s also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood.</p><p>At the heart of Gunk is a not-quite-love-not-quite-triangle between Jules, her feckless ex-husband Leon, nightclub owner and irredeemable waster, and the young, mysterious nim – that lower case “n” is all part of her vibe. Nim arrives one night at the club and captivates both Jules and Leon with her shaved head, her alluring mouth (“big and wet and laughing”), and the sense that she’s on the run from her old life. Much of the novel is told through flashback. Before we encounter nim at the club, we know that she has had a baby, left him with Jules, and vanished. Jules is alone trying to comfort a newborn that “knew by smell, by taste, that I was not&nbsp;his mother”. The main narrative consists of Jules telling us how this state of affairs came to pass.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/gunk-by-saba-sams-review-boozy-nights-and-baby-love">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 06:00:52 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/gunk-by-saba-sams-review-boozy-nights-and-baby-love</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4dc746a11fb23a9fdda410fd50752cd28120faa7/504_1054_3963_3168/master/3963.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=19662ff373addf829875695a9902d790"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alice Zoo</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4dc746a11fb23a9fdda410fd50752cd28120faa7/504_1054_3963_3168/master/3963.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6a865eec455f87cbf8732546705a2c57"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alice Zoo</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-09T06:00:52Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Emma Jane Unsworth: ‘I blush when I think of Miranda July’s All Fours. I became a changed woman’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/emma-jane-unsworth-i-blush-when-i-think-of-miranda-julys-all-fours-i-became-a-changed-woman</link> <description><p>The author of Slags on Patricia Highsmith, Judy Blume and her lifelong reaction to Yeats</p><p><strong>My earliest reading&nbsp;memory</strong><br> Probably a Garfield book&nbsp;when I was five or&nbsp;six. I&nbsp;loved Garfield. Mostly because he was funny, but also because he was an iconic ginger. He introduced me to lasagne, which I pronounced “la-sign”. It was the 1980s. I got told off all the time for reading at the dinner&nbsp;table.</p><p><strong>My favourite book&nbsp;growing up</strong><br> After my nanna’s Mills &amp;&nbsp;Boons, stolen from her&nbsp;bedside table, I’d have to say Lucy Maud Montgomery’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/19/10-things-anne-of-green-gables-taught-me">Anne of Green Gables</a>. Another iconic ginge. Also Anne and Gilbert were the greatest “will they/won’t they?” until Mulder and Scully in The X Files.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/emma-jane-unsworth-i-blush-when-i-think-of-miranda-julys-all-fours-i-became-a-changed-woman">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 09:00:55 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/emma-jane-unsworth-i-blush-when-i-think-of-miranda-julys-all-fours-i-became-a-changed-woman</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/eb4714cb250b671d9e807ac0ce8c81b34e90e785/0_1851_3307_2646/master/3307.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=33e18aaeb8ca73df84b8f567c35816f1"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alex Lake/Two Short Days</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/eb4714cb250b671d9e807ac0ce8c81b34e90e785/0_1851_3307_2646/master/3307.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1578abd792da2df61c7ee6a374fe1c0f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alex Lake/Two Short Days</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Emma Jane Unsworth</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-09T09:00:55Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/the-best-science-fiction-fantasy-and-horror-reviews-roundup</link> <description><p>The Devils by Joe Abercrombie; The Incandescent by Emily Tesh; Land of Hope by Cate Baum; A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/the-devils-9781399603560/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">The Devils</a> by Joe Abercrombie (</strong><strong>Gollancz, £25)</strong><br> Bookish Brother Diaz is stunned to be made vicar of the Chapel of Holy Expediency, whose congregation – a necromancer, a vampire, a werewolf, and an elf – are tasked with escorting a claimant to the imperial throne to her coronation. This is Suicide Squad in a sideways medieval Europe, where instead of the son of god we have a daughter, instead of a cross, a wheel, and instead of Byzantium, Troy. The worldbuilding is one of the novel’s chief pleasures, combining the familiar – crusades, religious schisms and territorial disputes – with strange and alien elements, such as the lost empire of Carthage, which built most of the world’s major cities before succumbing to its own dark magic. Against this backdrop, the sardonic crew of the Chapel make their way through a series of elaborate, violent set-pieces, barely escaping with their lives while causing mass death and property damage, and quipping relentlessly. This is enjoyable, particularly as we get to know characters such as Vigga, a happy-go-lucky Viking werewolf, and Sunny, a supposedly soulless elf who is the novel’s most ethical character. Eventually, however, it becomes repetitive, and the book’s sequel-bait ending is not entirely enticing.</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/the-incandescent-9780356525648/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">The Incandescent</a> by Emily Tesh </strong><strong>(Orbit, £20)</strong><br> Turning the magical school story genre on its head, Tesh’s follow-up to the Hugo-winning <a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/some-desperate-glory-9780356517186/">Some Desperate Glory</a> focuses not on precocious teenagers but on their teacher. Saffy Walden is director of magic at the prestigious Chetswood boarding school. When her A-level invocation class accidentally call up a demon much more dangerous than they can handle, Saffy must rise to the school’s defence, while also juggling budget meetings, difficult colleagues and a board who want to blame the whole mess on a talented scholarship student. Tesh is doing a lot of things with this novel. It is first and foremost a love letter to teachers, repeatedly making the point that their work is not only hard, but multifaceted and creative; but it is also a meditation on the pleasures of growing up – past the age where, most school stories tell us, all of life’s adventures happen, but which the novel insists is where the joyful work of becoming yourself can actually begin. And it’s a sharp indictment of the fact that a truly top-notch education remains accessible only to a privileged few. The result is a clever twist on a familiar fantasy story, starring a winning, flawed, undeniably grown-up heroine.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/the-best-science-fiction-fantasy-and-horror-reviews-roundup">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/science-fiction">Science fiction books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 08:00:56 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/09/the-best-science-fiction-fantasy-and-horror-reviews-roundup</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ddd212bee9b928c2ef55ca9ab7b5579df1464254/744_84_4187_3349/master/4187.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=720c79eeb550d9eccb791504bd5419de"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: John Morrison/Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ddd212bee9b928c2ef55ca9ab7b5579df1464254/744_84_4187_3349/master/4187.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=9b4e5307156f798d94c3d92fcfbc5d20"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: John Morrison/Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Abigail Nussbaum</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-09T08:00:56Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson review – a genre-defying graphic novel about class, religion and globalisation</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/08/ginseng-roots-by-craig-thompson-review-a-genre-defying-graphic-novel-about-class-religion-and-globalisation</link> <description><p>Can you tell the American story via ginseng? Thompson’s funny, moving and exquisitely drawn work has a go </p><p>Genre is a slippery beast at the best of times, but Craig Thompson’s new book is particularly hard to categorise. It’s a memoir, graphic novel, and piece of social commentary, all based around ginseng. Living in the dirt poor (literally) midwest in the 1980s, his family farmed the plant, with its weird humanoid roots, and Thompson and his brother spent their youths caked in mud and chemicals plucking them from the ground for a dollar an hour. Ginseng is an essential ingredient in many Chinese medicines, as well as a range of health gimmicks, and for various reasons, Wisconsin has been an unlikely centre of global production for several centuries.</p><p>Originally published in 12 issues from 2019 to 2024, Ginseng Roots is epic in length and breadth, but simultaneously pleasingly narrow in scope. It plays out in multiple strands that examine both the minutiae of a man’s life and the cultural history of a difficult-to-grow crop (once harvested, it cannot be grown in the same field again).</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/08/ginseng-roots-by-craig-thompson-review-a-genre-defying-graphic-novel-about-class-religion-and-globalisation">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/autobiography-and-memoir">Autobiography and memoir</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/comics">Comics and graphic novels</category> <pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2025 06:00:23 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/08/ginseng-roots-by-craig-thompson-review-a-genre-defying-graphic-novel-about-class-religion-and-globalisation</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ae3fe95a364fd578a30e133963ff5293eb455879/0_987_1950_1170/master/1950.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=3b7c953be5b8f7676554d6a50384b0e8"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Craig Thompson</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ae3fe95a364fd578a30e133963ff5293eb455879/0_987_1950_1170/master/1950.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=0e5db9d30d1c54f900d026e2d87b19c7"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Craig Thompson</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Adam Rutherford</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-08T06:00:23Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>This month’s best paperbacks: Elif Shafak, Richard Ayoade and more</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2025/apr/02/this-months-best-paperbacks-elif-shafak-richard-ayoade-and-more</link> <description><p>Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from an engrossing study of Chinese women to a fun, loveable novel</p><p><br> • This article was amended on 7 April 2025. In an earlier version, the author Kevin Barry’s surname was misspelled as “Berry”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2025/apr/02/this-months-best-paperbacks-elif-shafak-richard-ayoade-and-more">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/paperbacks">Paperbacks</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/richard-ayoade">Richard Ayoade</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/elif-shafak--books-">Elif Shafak</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/william-boyd">William Boyd</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/kevin-barry">Kevin Barry</category> <pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:07 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2025/apr/02/this-months-best-paperbacks-elif-shafak-richard-ayoade-and-more</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/73ead411baeddec3ecb2eb1da11ae3dc3a329002/0_0_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=78316f9fecc3dc6e4eec8486561c0adc"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Composite: PR Handout/Guardian Design Team</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/73ead411baeddec3ecb2eb1da11ae3dc3a329002/0_0_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=562c88871b5f7971a763f686a7f959af"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Composite: PR Handout/Guardian Design Team</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Guardian Staff</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-02T08:00:07Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Where to start with: Terry Pratchett</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/25/where-to-start-with-terry-pratchett</link> <description><p>Ten years on from his death and just before what would have been his 77th birthday, take a deep dive into the funny, fantasy works of one of the most loved British writers</p><p>With more than 75m copies of his books sold around the world, Terry Pratchett is one of the most loved British writers, best known for his comic fantasy novels set on a fictional planet, Discworld. Ten years on from the author’s death, and justbefore what would have been his 77th birthday, Pratchett’s biographer Marc Burrows has put together a guide to his hero’s work.</p><p>***</p><p>People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.</p><p>Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/25/where-to-start-with-terry-pratchett">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/terrypratchett">Terry Pratchett</category> <pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2025 11:00:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/25/where-to-start-with-terry-pratchett</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/19178ddf86d8df0ac2050d35780046c23e0c8c96/0_0_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=7f6dadaa0bafc77f5ce1f1ba97fd487f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Illustration: Guardian Design, Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/19178ddf86d8df0ac2050d35780046c23e0c8c96/0_0_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=198bb76d66c0738e2772a35aa00e6860"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Illustration: Guardian Design, Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Marc Burrows</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-25T11:00:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in April</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/what-were-reading-writers-and-readers-on-the-books-they-enjoyed-in-april-torrey-peters</link> <description><p>Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments</p><p>Even though it came out only last year, I was so impressed with Álvaro Enrigue’s <strong>You Dreamed of Empires</strong><em> </em>that I am on my second reread. As all around me institutions fall and norms fail, I feel the moment requires audacious re-imaginings of history or possibilities of thought, and on both a political and imaginative level, Enrigue delivers with his wild telling of the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/what-were-reading-writers-and-readers-on-the-books-they-enjoyed-in-april-torrey-peters">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/barbara-kingsolver">Barbara Kingsolver</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/tim-winton">Tim Winton</category> <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2025 13:00:15 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/what-were-reading-writers-and-readers-on-the-books-they-enjoyed-in-april-torrey-peters</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8c8af7e188724c5dadf25f58436902c2223d5ca7/0_0_2560_1536/master/2560.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=8103d49065c3e6f9a00e778d5363beb5"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Composite: PR Image</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8c8af7e188724c5dadf25f58436902c2223d5ca7/0_0_2560_1536/master/2560.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a1f7a0fbf5cb776a4b0444f7cfcbd302"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Composite: PR Image</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Torrey Peters, Sinéad Campbell and Guardian readers</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-30T13:00:15Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Pathemata by Maggie Nelson review – a writer’s attempt to describe chronic pain</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/05/pathemata-by-maggie-nelson-review-a-writers-attempt-to-describe-chronic-pain</link> <description><p>Woolf said language ‘runs dry’ when it comes to convey the reality of illness. Here is an impressive effort to do just that</p><p>In her landmark 1985 work, The Body in Pain, American essayist Elaine Scarry makes a case for the&nbsp;“unsharability” of pain and its resistance to language. “Physical pain,” she writes, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” Sixty years earlier in On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf made her famous claim about how language “runs dry” when it comes to articulating illness. Both theories grapple with inexpressibility. Experiencing serious, persistent pain invokes many feelings: irritation, curiosity (what’s causing it?), fear (of something sinister) and ultimately the desire to eradicate it. The search for a diagnosis can be as debilitating as the condition itself. In Pathemata: Or, the Story of My Mouth, Maggie Nelson tries to solve the mystery of a&nbsp;longstanding health issue. “Each morning, it is as if my mouth has survived a war – it has protested, it&nbsp;has&nbsp;hidden, it has suffered.”</p><p>Nelson breadcrumbs backwards through teenage orthodontist visits, recurrent battles with tonsillitis and “tongue thrust” in an attempt to find the source of the problem. She diligently keeps records of appointments, medications and scans, lugging files between GPs and several dentists whose waiting rooms show slick testimonial videos. Written during the pandemic, this short work is also testament to the apocalyptic uncertainty that infused that time. Her partner is in a separate support bubble and Nelson makes several attempts to get their son vaccinated, her frustration palpable. When the child complains about her anger, she confesses: “I have never felt as angry as I’ve felt over the past two years.”</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/05/pathemata-by-maggie-nelson-review-a-writers-attempt-to-describe-chronic-pain">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/autobiography-and-memoir">Autobiography and memoir</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/scienceandnature">Science and nature books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/healthmindandbody">Health, mind and body books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/society/health">Health</category> <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2025 08:00:30 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/05/pathemata-by-maggie-nelson-review-a-writers-attempt-to-describe-chronic-pain</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a51f0314ea514f4c3e6eb9c2d4b54da5853e9bc4/0_867_3743_2246/master/3743.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d74f9ae06aa38daa3139c7beb71096c0"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bridgeman Images</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a51f0314ea514f4c3e6eb9c2d4b54da5853e9bc4/0_867_3743_2246/master/3743.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c6bab441d3f9798b2e4e8583be9e1bf5"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bridgeman Images</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Sinéad Gleeson</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-05T08:00:30Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Red Pockets by Alice Mah review – finding hope amid the climate crisis</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/red-pockets-by-alice-mah-review-finding-hope-amid-the-climate-crisis</link> <description><p>A professor’s quest to make sense of her eco-anxiety takes her from her ancestral village in China to Cop 26 and beyond</p><p>Eco-anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations”. Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil Alice Mah’s new book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds.</p><p>Mah is a professor of urban and&nbsp;environmental studies at the University of Glasgow as well as an activist passionately concerned with pollution, ecological breakdown and climate justice. Her previous books, Petrochemical Planet and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/24/how-the-plastic-industry-turned-the-pandemic-to-its-advantage">Plastic Unlimited</a>, catalogued the catastrophic impacts of the petrochemical industry on the natural and human world. In Red Pockets, the trauma is personal.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/red-pockets-by-alice-mah-review-finding-hope-amid-the-climate-crisis">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/autobiography-and-memoir">Autobiography and memoir</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/scienceandnature">Science and nature books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/world/china">China</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-crisis">Climate crisis</category> <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 06:00:03 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/red-pockets-by-alice-mah-review-finding-hope-amid-the-climate-crisis</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1820bdd95450b79e052b3400212dd48d9256a214/0_304_8192_4918/master/8192.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6253f2043628a27d617bc42174f680ca"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1820bdd95450b79e052b3400212dd48d9256a214/0_304_8192_4918/master/8192.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e2282cd7792bdba13767aabff5c135d1"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Anita Roy</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-02T06:00:03Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review – streams of consciousness</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane-review-streams-of-consciousness</link> <description><p>An impassioned plea to save our rivers combines poetry and adventure</p><p>Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a&nbsp;thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really <em>alive</em>? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?”</p><p>He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should&nbsp;be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021,&nbsp;the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now&nbsp;reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River&nbsp;Ouse.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane-review-streams-of-consciousness">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/scienceandnature">Science and nature books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/robert-macfarlane">Robert Macfarlane</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/rivers">Rivers</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/endangered-habitats">Endangered habitats</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/activism">Environmental activism</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/conservation">Conservation</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/environment">Environment</category> <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2025 06:30:53 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane-review-streams-of-consciousness</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/622c92d85333de8832b82d84befcdbc78361fff2/0_1350_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e3c1d74060f83c8231dc4ea49c0cea3c"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: sasaperic/Getty Images/iStockphoto</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/622c92d85333de8832b82d84befcdbc78361fff2/0_1350_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ef019ae20f449da81a026d3b8ba63f01"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: sasaperic/Getty Images/iStockphoto</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Blake Morrison</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-28T06:30:53Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review – meet the brutalists</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/the-alienation-effect-by-owen-hatherley-review-meet-the-brutalists</link> <description><p>The remarkable story of how British culture was transformed by émigré architects, filmmakers and writers</p><p>The Englishness of English Art&nbsp;sounds like something a parish-pump little Englander might like to bang on about, but it is in fact the title of an arresting study by the German Jewish émigré Nikolaus Pevsner. “Neither English-born nor&nbsp;English-bred,” as he put it in his foreword, he nevertheless pinned down with startling precision the qualities that characterised English art&nbsp;and architecture: a rather twee&nbsp;preference for cuteness and compromise, for frills and fripperies.</p><p>This shouldn’t surprise us. Newcomers are typically better placed&nbsp;than natives when it comes to&nbsp;deciphering unwritten social codes.&nbsp;Unencumbered by textbook propaganda and excessive knowledge, the stranger’s-eye view very often has&nbsp;the merit of freshness, even originality. Bertolt Brecht dubbed this&nbsp;the <em>Verfremdungseffekt</em>, or alienation effect, from which Owen&nbsp;Hatherley takes his title.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/the-alienation-effect-by-owen-hatherley-review-meet-the-brutalists">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/history">History books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/art">Art and design books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture">Architecture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artanddesign">Art and design</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2025 06:30:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/the-alienation-effect-by-owen-hatherley-review-meet-the-brutalists</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/94e0f8069f603f7495a2ac7f0f94f73eef88defa/0_272_5420_3251/master/5420.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=609c82f78f6768b5c5e4b0eb42bf80f8"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: David Cairns/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/94e0f8069f603f7495a2ac7f0f94f73eef88defa/0_272_5420_3251/master/5420.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=f1814cdb1ddcf752f778134854bac5bd"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: David Cairns/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Pratinav Anil</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-30T06:30:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Notes to John by Joan Didion review – an invasion of privacy</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/notes-to-john-by-joan-didion-review-a-writer-on-the-couch</link> <description><p>There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but no one comes out of it well</p><p>Motherhood is a state of continuous loss that is meant to culminate when the dependent baby becomes an independent adult. Joan Didion survived this, as many mothers have, by keeping constant watch over her adopted daughter Quintana, fearing “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet”. She also survived it, as fewer mothers have, by writing obsessively about the loss she feared. In her arid, fevered masterpiece Play It&nbsp;As It Lays, published when Quintana was four, the narrator’s breakdown is precipitated by her daughter’s long-term hospitalisation with an unnamed mental disorder. A Book of Common Prayer is about the disappearance of the protagonist’s criminal revolutionary daughter. “Marin was loose in the world and could leave it at any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing” – a description that could be applied to motherhood in general.</p><p>The coddling failed. Quintana drank to self-medicate for anxiety and by 33 she was an alcoholic whose therapist wanted her mother to participate in the&nbsp;treatment. And so in 1999 Didion, who had hitherto protected her inner life with her trademark dark glasses and stylish sentences with their wilfully “impenetrable polish”, found herself&nbsp;seeing Freudian analyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. Now her notes on their sessions have been, in my view misguidedly, gathered from her archive and packaged as a book.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/notes-to-john-by-joan-didion-review-a-writer-on-the-couch">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/joan-didion">Joan Didion</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/autobiography-and-memoir">Autobiography and memoir</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/biography">Biography books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:00:56 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/notes-to-john-by-joan-didion-review-a-writer-on-the-couch</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/91b69470816aa04c2214ac01c94e2a342c486242/821_1251_3830_2298/master/3830.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a7d395b18d04bd431dc6cb34d6a2c882"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Dorothy Hong/Dorothy Hong (commissioned)</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/91b69470816aa04c2214ac01c94e2a342c486242/821_1251_3830_2298/master/3830.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=9f4aa304d678334585476bde3b9f074b"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Dorothy Hong/Dorothy Hong (commissioned)</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Lara Feigel</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-28T08:00:56Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith review – refreshingly frank portraits of female friendship</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/apr/25/bad-friend-by-tiffany-watt-smith-review-refreshingly-frank-portraits-of-female-friendship</link> <description><p>A social and personal history that refuses to gloss over the rage, envy and hurt that form part of every close bond</p><p>Falling out with a friend can feel&nbsp;oddly shameful. Romantic relationships are meant to have passionate highs and lows, but by the time you reach adulthood, you expect your friendships to have reached some kind of equilibrium. I have this image in my head of myself as an affectionate, devoted friend – but sometimes I examine my true feelings towards the women who are closest to me and feel shocked by my own pettiness. It is embarrassing to be a grownup but still capable of such intense flashes of rage, and envy. When my friendships become distant or strained, I wonder why I still struggle to do this basic thing.</p><p>Bad Friend represents a kind of love letter to female friendship, but doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be. Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian, and this book is a deeply researched study of 20th-century women’s relationships, but the reason for writing it is intensely personal. In the prologue, she says that she fell out with her best friend, Sofia, in her early 30s, and has been battling with the feeling that she is incapable of close friendship ever since. In one passage, she describes hiding a sparkly “BFF” (best friends forever) T-shirt from her five-year-old daughter, because she felt so conflicted about having no BFF of her own. But the idea that underpins this book is that we expect too much of&nbsp;female friendship, and that leaves every woman feeling inadequate.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/apr/25/bad-friend-by-tiffany-watt-smith-review-refreshingly-frank-portraits-of-female-friendship">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/friendship">Friendship</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/society/society">Society</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/women">Women</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/society/women">Women</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle">Life and style</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/society">Society books</category> <pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2025 06:00:28 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/apr/25/bad-friend-by-tiffany-watt-smith-review-refreshingly-frank-portraits-of-female-friendship</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0eaaad05d7936940cd2650d59a8400a756769a1e/280_659_6478_3887/master/6478.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=302742ceee144849c0da66cefceeb4a3"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: HBO</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0eaaad05d7936940cd2650d59a8400a756769a1e/280_659_6478_3887/master/6478.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=4ff34fe57ff1ee6a0ce5d8a5a808a8de"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: HBO</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Kitty Drake</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-25T06:00:28Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Men of a Certain Age by Kate Mossman review – close encounters with charismatic male rockers</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/24/men-of-a-certain-age-by-kate-mossman-review-close-encounters-with-charismatic-male-rockers</link> <description><p>A journalist’s bracingly honest account of interviews with musicians from Brian May to Shaun Ryder</p><p>When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the “middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come&nbsp;before”. Watching Queen’s posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she “felt something within myself ignite”. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: “I think I’m going to black out.”</p><p>Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a&nbsp;Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jun/29/magazine-word-to-close">the Word</a>, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19&nbsp;encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/21/dave-gahan-regret-is-a-weird-word-i-dont-look-back-on-my-life-like-that">Dave Gahan</a>, Jon Bon Jovi, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/mar/28/nick-cave-on-love-art-and-the-loss-of-his-sons-its-against-nature-to-bury-your-children">Nick Cave</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/oct/05/why-terence-trent-darby-became-sananda-maitreya-it-was-that-or-death">Terence Trent D’Arby</a>. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/24/men-of-a-certain-age-by-kate-mossman-review-close-encounters-with-charismatic-male-rockers">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/music">Music books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/queen">Queen</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <pubDate>Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:59 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/24/men-of-a-certain-age-by-kate-mossman-review-close-encounters-with-charismatic-male-rockers</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/dd02de691d46618693009ae07df62f9382b79d78/0_191_2973_1784/master/2973.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=63740dedcee233957f153a2869bc7f57"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Paul Natkin/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/dd02de691d46618693009ae07df62f9382b79d78/0_191_2973_1784/master/2973.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=8eb983dcdd030ac3c4fc08e600640e66"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Paul Natkin/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Fiona Sturges</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-24T08:00:59Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>The best recent poetry – review roundup</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup</link> <description><p>Midden Witch by Fiona Benson; Dwell by Simon Armitage; Nature Matters edited by Mona Arshi &amp; Karen McCarthy Woolf; Lode by Gillian Allnutt; Silk Work by Imogen Cassels; A History of Western Music by August Kleinzahler</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/midden-witch-9781787335240?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;amp;utm_campaign=article">Midden Witch</a> by Fiona Benson (Jonathan Cape, £13)</strong><strong><br></strong>In her fourth collection Benson turns her fierce attention to the individuals hounded as witches. Her language is rich with “a broth of sweat” that brings middens – dunghills – and sweeter smells to life. Men’s power to conduct legalised persecution of women through accusations of sorcery is never far from the surface: “The church will pay a killing / for a witch.” These are poems cast as beautiful, intricate spells, reminding us there is more to life than we can hope to explain: “Perhaps we are all waiting / for the watcher in the dark, / attending to the glow / of that private thing, the soul.”</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/dwell-9780571394470/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Dwell </a>by Simon Armitage (Faber, £10)</strong><strong><br></strong>The poet laureate uses the conceit of where animals live, their setts, hives and warrens, to ruminate on how other species can thrive in the face of human domination. Armitage’s tone is delightful. A squirrel in her drey is living “a non-stop stop-motion life”. Rather beautifully, “every hare / is a broken heart / with legs”. Best of all are the Tripadvisor-style reviews in Insect Hotel: “Dark and dingy. Had to ask a glow-worm to show me to my room.” These are poems full of a winning, pleasurable charm.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/poetry">Poetry</category> <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 11:01:05 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1eddd6da503a9610168f4a52e3f660eb0bf05f77/46_20_4119_2470/master/4119.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=7cb1936e16f807ffb639143c31aa5da6"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Jacky Parker Photography/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1eddd6da503a9610168f4a52e3f660eb0bf05f77/46_20_4119_2470/master/4119.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=24778d932aaa260113b0fc0623ab828d"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Jacky Parker Photography/Getty Images</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Rishi Dastidar</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-02T11:01:05Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn review – troubled minds and family mysteries</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/parallel-lines-by-edward-st-aubyn-review-troubled-minds-and-family-mysteries</link> <description><p>The Patrick Melrose author brings his trademark dark wit and flinty compassion to this wide-ranging sequel</p><p>Edward St Aubyn’s previous novel, 2021’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/31/double-blind-by-edward-st-aubyn-review-in-pursuit-of-knowledge">Double Blind</a>, was something of a challenge even for his devotees. Leaving aside the usual gripe that he is never quite as compelling without the shield of his authorial alter ego Patrick Melrose, the obsessive nature of the book’s inquiry into bioethics, narcosis, psychotherapy, oncology, venture capitalism and inheritance made too heady a cocktail to be more than sipped, a few pages at a time. I struggled with it until the very last scene, a charity bash where a schizophrenic young man takes his first terrified steps in employment as a waiter and happens upon a woman who, unknown to both, is intimately related to him. Their chance encounter was intensely moving and tautly suspenseful – you felt an immediate longing to know what would befall them.</p><p>That longing is now answered in Parallel Lines, which picks up the narrative five years later and reintroduces its cast of interestingly troubled characters. Francis, a botanist pursuing a rewilding project on a Sussex country estate, has now joined an NGO in Ecuador trying to save the Amazonian rainforest. He’s also raising a son with his wife, Olivia, a writer producing a radio series on natural disasters and wondering whether Francis can resist the amorous lures of his philanthropist boss. Olivia’s best friend, Lucy, is in the throes of treatment for a brain tumour, the traumatic reverberations from which have forced her boyfriend – wild man plutocrat and drug fiend Hunter – to seek refuge with “compassion burnout” at an Italian monastery, where he’s hosted by a gentle abbot, Guido.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/parallel-lines-by-edward-st-aubyn-review-troubled-minds-and-family-mysteries">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/edwardstaubyn">Edward St Aubyn</category> <pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:00:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/parallel-lines-by-edward-st-aubyn-review-troubled-minds-and-family-mysteries</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/502824929a0e3524fc166d2c7e881125cc8e360f/115_1312_2604_1561/master/2604.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6e245c7b7b9de2128a78eea192f81f48"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: opale.photo/eyevine</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/502824929a0e3524fc166d2c7e881125cc8e360f/115_1312_2604_1561/master/2604.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=067da2fa99a5abf8f55192e389ef3b6a"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: opale.photo/eyevine</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Anthony Quinn</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-29T06:00:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley review – a delightfully grounded romance</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/consider-yourself-kissed-by-jessica-stanley-review-a-delightfully-grounded-romance</link> <description><p>This irresistible love story braids the personal and the political – from Brexit to who gets to use the spare room as an office</p><p>There are not many romantic novels that include Brexit, Boris&nbsp;Johnson’s ICU stay and the&nbsp;“Edstone”. Then again, not many political novels begin with a classic meet-cute. Jessica Stanley’s UK debut, Consider Yourself Kissed, is – to misquote Dorothy L Sayers – either a political story with romantic interludes, or a romance novel with political interludes. It is also the kind of book that, for a certain kind of reader, will immediately become a treasure.</p><p>That meet-cute, then: Coralie, a&nbsp;young Australian copywriter, and Adam, a single dad, swap homes for a single night. Adam looks like a shorter, younger Colin Firth; Coralie waits in vain for him to tell her that she looks “like Lizzy Bennet, a known fact at school”. Coralie considers Adam’s neat bookcase of political biographies, including – to her joy – those of Australian politicians. Adam considers Coralie’s piles of “those green-spine books by women”. They fall in love, books-first, fairly instantly. And the reader who knows immediately that<strong> </strong>battered green spines mean Virago Press, and that what is being implied by Coralie’s careful collection is key to&nbsp;not just her character, but the character of this novel as a whole – <em>that</em>&nbsp;reader will also be irresistibly, hopelessly in love by chapter three. (If this meet-cute does nothing for you, you’re in the wrong place.)</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/consider-yourself-kissed-by-jessica-stanley-review-a-delightfully-grounded-romance">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:20 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/consider-yourself-kissed-by-jessica-stanley-review-a-delightfully-grounded-romance</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2969435b9d3f08bf20af55910acf67d9b664f837/0_248_7360_4415/master/7360.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=144c25fa42f3ffe8ceb7e4423922ac99"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: PeopleImages/Getty Images/iStockphoto</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2969435b9d3f08bf20af55910acf67d9b664f837/0_248_7360_4415/master/7360.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=4d7f51d3d1901272ed0369ed649807e6"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: PeopleImages/Getty Images/iStockphoto</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Ella Risbridger</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-29T08:00:20Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata review – a future without sex</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/vanishing-world-by-sayaka-murata-review-a-future-without-sex</link> <description><p>The Convenience Store Woman author imagines the creep of a new worldview, in a novel that highlights the weirdness of normal life</p><p>In Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s fiction, characters do perverse things in order to “play the part of&nbsp;the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’”. This description comes from Keiko, the 36-year-old narrator of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/07/convenience-store-woman-sayaka-murata-review">Convenience Store Woman</a>. Keiko’s conformist family and friends can’t believe she can be happy being single and working a dead-end job at a&nbsp;convenience store. Keiko finds an unexpected way to make it look as though she is normal: she keeps a man in her bathtub, hoping that everyone will simply assume they are a couple. A similar idea appears in Murata’s short story Poochie, from the collection Life Ceremony. A young girl&nbsp;takes a friend to a shed in the mountains to meet her pet; the friend is surprised to discover that the pet is a middle-aged man. Murata is interested in the lengths humans will go to in order to domesticate one another. Something in that has touched a nerve – Convenience Store Woman became a&nbsp;surprise bestseller.</p><p>Vanishing World, Murata’s latest novel to be translated into English, is&nbsp;set in a speculative Tokyo where artificial insemination is ubiquitous and sex is considered “unhygienic”. The narrator, Amane, grows up with a&nbsp;mother who is still attached to the vanishing world of sex within marriage. Although Amane considers it a shameful secret that she was conceived via intercourse, as an adolescent she experiments beyond the passionately imagined relationships with anime characters that are more typical among her friends. Her first experience is disappointing: her friend Mizuuchi has trouble finding “the mysterious cavity” where he can insert his penis. By the time she gets married, Amane has come round to the view that marital sex is “incest”. When her husband initiates a kiss, she vomits into his mouth and reports him to the police.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/vanishing-world-by-sayaka-murata-review-a-future-without-sex">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/sayaka-murata">Sayaka Murata</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction-in-translation">Fiction in translation</category> <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:18 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/30/vanishing-world-by-sayaka-murata-review-a-future-without-sex</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5943a1c205e4a9ff92fa963a282f4236e82eb6ea/0_213_4500_2701/master/4500.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=708e0c31ee5cf8065f1494f6ae394f21"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Kentaro Takahashi/New York Times/Redux/eyevine</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5943a1c205e4a9ff92fa963a282f4236e82eb6ea/0_213_4500_2701/master/4500.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=599bc9baf690d541491256e532a64496"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Kentaro Takahashi/New York Times/Redux/eyevine</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Caleb Klaces</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-30T08:00:18Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>The Pretender by Jo Harkin review – a bold and brilliant comedy of royal intrigue</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/01/the-pretender-by-jo-harkin-review-a-bold-and-brilliant-comedy-of-royal-intrigue</link> <description><p>This fantasia on the life of Lambert Simnel, who finds himself a claimant to the English throne, is a romp through late-medieval identity and historical uncertainty</p><p>One day in 1484, strange men arrive at the Oxfordshire farm where 10-year-old John Collan lives. They’ve come to carry him away to a new life, for he is not, after all, the&nbsp;farmer’s son; in fact, he’s Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, spirited away in infancy to keep him safe ahead of the day he might return to claim the throne of England. That day is now in sight. He can’t call himself John any more, but he can’t yet be announced as Edward, Earl of Warwick. In the meantime he’ll be given a third name: Lambert Simnel.</p><p>Over the course of this fantastically accomplished novel, the many-named boy will travel from Oxford to Burgundy then Ireland, and at last into&nbsp;the paranoid and double-crossing heart of Henry VII’s court. The tail end&nbsp;of the Wars of the Roses – with Richard&nbsp;III’s crown snatched from the mud of Bosworth by Henry Tudor – is a&nbsp;foment of plot and counter-plot, and our hero spends his adolescence being passed around scheming factions who go so far as to hold a coronation for him. What a painful life this is for a boy “so&nbsp;grateful for any amount of love” as he falls in and out of favour, uncertain of his own parentage, gaining and losing relatives as their interest turns to other plots and other pretenders.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/01/the-pretender-by-jo-harkin-review-a-bold-and-brilliant-comedy-of-royal-intrigue">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 06:00:17 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/01/the-pretender-by-jo-harkin-review-a-bold-and-brilliant-comedy-of-royal-intrigue</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/737e7d3568529c7c4d00aa6a01f2fd8379c1c626/209_70_4672_2805/master/4672.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=5236257eb38c89c1f20e8de64acd4f40"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: J Robaczynski</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/737e7d3568529c7c4d00aa6a01f2fd8379c1c626/209_70_4672_2805/master/4672.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a90c80fbf94cd4eeab0a0769b3ef72ae"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: J Robaczynski</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Imogen Hermes Gowar</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-01T06:00:17Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Sister Europe by Nell Zink review – all the ideas Trump deems most dangerous</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/26/sister-europe-by-nell-zink-review-all-the-ideas-trump-deems-most-dangerous</link> <description><p>This comedy of manners set among Berlin’s cultural elite is a prescient interrogation of language, identity and power</p><p>On 7 March 2025 the New York Times<em> </em>published<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html"> a list of words</a> that the Trump administration was systematically culling from government documents and educational materials. This list, which includes the words “gender ideology”, “affirming care”, “confirmation bias”, “ethnicity”, “identity”, “immigrants”, “racism”, “prostitute”, “political”, “intersectional” and “privilege”, reads&nbsp;like a bingo card for Nell Zink’s astonishingly prescient new novel, Sister Europe, in which a large cast of&nbsp;racially, economically and gender-diverse characters convene over the course of a single evening to attend a literary awards ceremony in Berlin.</p><p>On its surface, Sister Europe is a comedy of manners set among Berlin’s&nbsp;exclusive and elusive cultural elite. The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny: Zink’s dialogue reads like our best plays. Entertaining banter could be this book’s largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which are so ambitious and ethically interested that they make it clear that Zink is one of our most important contemporary writers.</p><p><em>On reading [Masud’s] books, Demian discovered to his consternation a grating and persistent </em><em>anti-Black racism</em><em>. Was it excusable? He excused it, on the grounds that it would be hard for an </em><em>anti-Black racist</em><em> to do much damage in Norway, where anti-Muslim racism was a deadly threat (admittedly much of&nbsp;it intersectional, directed against Somalis). Was it patronising to suspend his ethical standards because the man was a genius, or Eurocentric not to suspend them, and which was&nbsp;worse?</em></p><p><em>He whispered hesitantly, speaking into the towel over her ear, “You want to change your life.”</em></p><p><em>“That was stupid,” she replied. “Life should change me. I don’t want to be destructive of a living thing, flattening it with my</em> <strong>identity</strong><em>.” She said the word slowly. As though identities were something ubiquitous, but distasteful, like dust mites, that might be dispensed with, given careful hygiene.</em></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/26/sister-europe-by-nell-zink-review-all-the-ideas-trump-deems-most-dangerous">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Sat, 26 Apr 2025 06:00:58 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/26/sister-europe-by-nell-zink-review-all-the-ideas-trump-deems-most-dangerous</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d21865bf27b7d80678c88185813076730c16273f/0_680_2670_1602/master/2670.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ebcfc6274d4b6f2c0a8e9bc7d17ccaa6"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Frederik van den Berg/The Observer</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d21865bf27b7d80678c88185813076730c16273f/0_680_2670_1602/master/2670.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=37474c4666c1c15a13785643ab396853"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Frederik van den Berg/The Observer</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Rita Bullwinkel</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-26T06:00:58Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Luminous by Silvia Park review – a major new voice in SF</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/23/luminous-by-silvia-park-review-a-major-new-voice-in-sf</link> <description><p>From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person</p><p>Silvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that&nbsp;is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: <em>“</em>affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk”. As&nbsp;the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to&nbsp;protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.</p><p>This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author’s note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children’s fiction, until a&nbsp;bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel “a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children”. There’s an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book’s central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel’s setting – a future unified Korea – does on the level of geography.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/23/luminous-by-silvia-park-review-a-major-new-voice-in-sf">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/science-fiction">Science fiction books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:18 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/23/luminous-by-silvia-park-review-a-major-new-voice-in-sf</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c2622c65704b38a12c5cc5764f96807700d45bfe/165_240_4882_2929/master/4882.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bd8baf1a680b2a6b74108239579a0166"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Matthiola/Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c2622c65704b38a12c5cc5764f96807700d45bfe/165_240_4882_2929/master/4882.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bd78cd9b98e037689221812ebd39d6db"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Matthiola/Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Adam Roberts</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-23T08:00:18Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Children’s and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/25/childrens-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels</link> <description><p>A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and more</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/gozzle-9781529076417/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Gozzle</a> by Julia Donaldson</strong><strong>, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99</strong><strong><br></strong>When a bear finds a goose egg, rather than breakfast, it hatches sweet, tenacious Gozzle, who’s convinced goslings can do everything bears do. But what will happen when she learns to fly? A comically adorable picture book about family, growth and change.</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/leave-the-trees-please-9781915569202/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Leave the Trees, Please</a> by Benjamin Zephaniah</strong><strong>, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon, Magic Cat, £12.99</strong><strong><br></strong>Zephaniah’s posthumously published picture book, featuring a dynamic repeated refrain and soaring, swirling illustrations, calls on young listeners to safeguard trees and the riches of the natural world.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/25/childrens-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksforchildrenandteenagers">Children and teenagers</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/young-adult">Young adult</category> <pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2025 11:00:34 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/25/childrens-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3b55a64ebb050cca6e09a1f8bd4a409d0261c9f4/221_153_2333_1401/master/2333.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ba6fd274f3ff09cc399a4846e6683165"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: © Julia Donaldson and Sara Ogilvie 2025 - Macmillan Children's Books</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3b55a64ebb050cca6e09a1f8bd4a409d0261c9f4/221_153_2333_1401/master/2333.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e04f76ee614dddf3ef44508c7ea2450b"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: © Julia Donaldson and Sara Ogilvie 2025 - Macmillan Children's Books</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Imogen Russell Williams</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-25T11:00:34Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Children and teens roundup – the best new chapter books</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/01/children-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-chapter-books-choose-your-own-adventures-the-abominable-snowman-journey-under-the-sea-ra-montgomery-helen-rutter-the-boy-with-big-decisions-anthony-mcgowan-the-beck-padraig-kenny-after-the-line-they-drew-through-us-hiba-noor-khan-jessie-burton-hidden-treasure-deep-dark-zohra-nabi</link> <description><p>A classic Yeti romp with 28 possible endings, a Blade Runner-style thriller and more adventures on the Thames with Jessie Burton</p><p>Before video games dangled dopamine hits and a sense of agency, there were <em>Choose Your Own Adventure</em> books, where the reader could go through the portal – or turn to face the monster. The 1980s-90s franchise still holds much affection, cropping up in a forthcoming <em>Stranger Things</em> homage spin-off, <em><a href="https://www.guardianbookshop.com/stranger-things-heroes-and-monsters-9780241786321/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Heroes and Monsters</a></em>, for one.</p><p>A new Pushkin Children’s reboot features six pacy titles by one of the most prolific original authors in the series, the late <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/27/how-choose-your-own-adventures-helped-me-win-the-booker-prize">RA Montgomery</a>: romps such as <strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/the-abominable-snowman-9781782695158/">The Abominable Snowman</a></strong>, which has 28 possible endings, and <strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/journey-under-the-sea-9781782694977/">Journey Under the Sea</a></strong>. The hope is to lure children back into their imaginations.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/01/children-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-chapter-books-choose-your-own-adventures-the-abominable-snowman-journey-under-the-sea-ra-montgomery-helen-rutter-the-boy-with-big-decisions-anthony-mcgowan-the-beck-padraig-kenny-after-the-line-they-drew-through-us-hiba-noor-khan-jessie-burton-hidden-treasure-deep-dark-zohra-nabi">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksforchildrenandteenagers">Children and teenagers</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/childrens-books-8-12-years">Children's books: 8-12 years</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:00:12 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/01/children-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-chapter-books-choose-your-own-adventures-the-abominable-snowman-journey-under-the-sea-ra-montgomery-helen-rutter-the-boy-with-big-decisions-anthony-mcgowan-the-beck-padraig-kenny-after-the-line-they-drew-through-us-hiba-noor-khan-jessie-burton-hidden-treasure-deep-dark-zohra-nabi</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/91ed838f7f6018e9a6ec40ca89fbd069a0b9ae28/0_126_1456_874/master/1456.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=f36174e01c7bc783a85533836845df7d"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Illustration: PR</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/91ed838f7f6018e9a6ec40ca89fbd069a0b9ae28/0_126_1456_874/master/1456.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=9554227c6405a5800e7887feac4efb15"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Illustration: PR</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Kitty Empire</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-01T08:00:12Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Children’s and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/21/childrens-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels</link> <description><p>Sleepy monsters; a wacky broken robot; a search for magical treasures and more</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/hello-bunny-9781035038275/">Hello Bunny!</a> </strong><strong>by </strong><strong>Sharon King-Chai</strong><strong>, </strong><strong>Two Hoots</strong><strong>, </strong><strong>£8.99</strong><br> An entrancingly bold, shiny board book, full of bright creatures, joyous greetings, and a baby-pleasing mirror at the end.</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/sleep-tight-disgusting-blob-9780241684450/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;amp;utm_campaign=article">Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob</a> by </strong><strong>Huw Aaron, Puffin, £7.99</strong><br> Featuring a catalogue of sleepy monsters from cyborg to yeti, winding down alongside the cute little blob of the title, this rhyming bedtime picture book is a witty, tender mix of the adorable and the appalling.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/21/childrens-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/childrens-animals">Animals</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksforchildrenandteenagers">Children and teenagers</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/childrens-books-8-12-years">Children's books: 8-12 years</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/childrens-books-7-and-under">Children's books: 7 and under</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/young-adult">Young adult</category> <pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2025 12:00:20 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/21/childrens-and-teens-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e9863d1f75d0f102a1e6a2ee6d24dea885344903/0_94_5831_3499/master/5831.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=81a5d2b91e562ec731263b162536ee68"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Huw Aaron</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e9863d1f75d0f102a1e6a2ee6d24dea885344903/0_94_5831_3499/master/5831.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=84c2bc6e01b89d56b19e60ee16596615"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Huw Aaron</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Imogen Russell Williams</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-03-21T12:00:20Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Writer Saba Sams: ‘I wanted it to be sexy and really messy’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/27/writer-saba-sams-i-wanted-it-to-be-sexy-and-really-messy</link> <description><p>The Send Nudes author, one of Granta’s pick of the best young British novelists, on young motherhood, feminism and why we need to break the rules around love </p><p>Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. “I didn’t even think it was a book,” she says when we meet. “I was just learning how to write.”</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/15/send-nudes-by-saba-sams-review-sex-and-solitude">Send Nudes</a>, her first collection, about being a young woman in a messed-up world, was published in 2022. She won the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c6gq">BBC national short story award</a> and the Edge Hill short story prize. The following year, she made the once-in-a-decade Granta <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/15/grantas-best-of-young-british-novelists-meet-the-class-of-23">Best of Young British Novelists</a> list. “Then I was like: ‘Oh, this is actually happening. This feels like a big deal,’” she says.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/27/writer-saba-sams-i-wanted-it-to-be-sexy-and-really-messy">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/society/women">Women</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/society/sexuality">Sexuality</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/parents-and-parenting">Parents and parenting</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle">Life and style</category> <pubDate>Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:00:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/27/writer-saba-sams-i-wanted-it-to-be-sexy-and-really-messy</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bc4e2e11f7dd5c1d5cf0d992a266619ccf8f5ae6/137_670_5305_3182/master/5305.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=adee4e627ce7df43a2c56e5d2676ea57"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alice Zoo</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bc4e2e11f7dd5c1d5cf0d992a266619ccf8f5ae6/137_670_5305_3182/master/5305.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ee67bf28f5f180c6b2df4b8213e6b5d2"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alice Zoo</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Lisa Allardice</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-27T11:00:32Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Jeanette Winterson: ‘I’d like to go up in space as a very old lady and just be pushed out’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/apr/27/jeanette-winterson-id-like-to-go-up-in-space-as-a-very-old-lady-and-just-be-pushed-out</link> <description><p>The Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit author on being a good landlord to a grumpy ghost, her optimism about AI and the ideal size for cats</p><ul><li>Read more <a href="https://viewer.gutools.co.uk/culture/series/10-chaotic-questions">10 Chaotic Questions</a></li><li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/newsletters/2019/oct/18/saved-for-later-sign-up-for-guardian-australias-culture-and-lifestyle-email?CMP=cvau_sfl">Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email</a></li></ul><p><strong>Your debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit turns 40 years old this year. How do you feel about it at this point in your life?</strong></p><p>Can you believe it? <em>I</em> find that astonishing. I’m always having to think about it because people keep bothering me about it! Its next iteration is a musical, and then I really hope that’s the end. Just let me go! Obviously I love Oranges and I revisited it again with [her 2011 memoir] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/04/why-be-happy-jeanette-winterson-review">Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?</a> and the musical too. Surely, by the rule of three, this is it? Then I can live in peace and plant potatoes.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/apr/27/jeanette-winterson-id-like-to-go-up-in-space-as-a-very-old-lady-and-just-be-pushed-out">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/jeanettewinterson">Jeanette Winterson</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/sydney-writers-festival">Sydney writers' festival</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Sat, 26 Apr 2025 20:00:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/apr/27/jeanette-winterson-id-like-to-go-up-in-space-as-a-very-old-lady-and-just-be-pushed-out</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/abe25290c834ad6890538e7292976888ee7ba367/0_448_6720_4032/master/6720.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=8511cc219c12a04446ea4068b6356baf"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/abe25290c834ad6890538e7292976888ee7ba367/0_448_6720_4032/master/6720.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a4f211b5ae2aa30c6f310120703c3cfb"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Sian Cain</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-26T20:00:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>‘Marriage feels like a hostage situation, and motherhood a curse’: Japanese author Sayaka Murata</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/marriage-feels-like-a-hostage-situation-and-motherhood-a-curse-japanese-author-sayaka-murata</link> <description><p>The Convenience Store Woman author is renowned for challenging social norms in darkly weird near-future fiction. She discusses sex, feminism and her struggles to be an ‘ordinary earthling’</p><p>“I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a&nbsp;lot of people in stories,” Sayaka Murata, the Japanese author of the bestseller <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/07/convenience-store-woman-sayaka-murata-review">Convenience Store Woman</a>, confides a few minutes into our interview. “I’ve been told by my doctor&nbsp;not to talk about this too much,&nbsp;but&nbsp;ever since I was a child, I’ve&nbsp;had 30&nbsp;or 40 imaginary friends who live on&nbsp;a different star or planet with whom&nbsp;I have shared love and sexual experiences.”</p><p>It is 7pm in Tokyo, mid-morning in London. Sitting upright at a desk in an empty publisher’s office, the 45-year-old author – wearing a cream silk blouse and with a neatly curled bob – might be reading the news rather than discussing imaginary friends. For&nbsp;context, her latest novel to be translated into English, Vanishing World, depicts a future in which people no longer have sex and the main character carries 40 “lovers” – plastic anime key rings – in her black Prada pouch. Our conversation is made possible thanks to the skilful translation of Bethan Jones, who relates Murata’s long, thoughtful and utterly unpredictable answers. As video calls go, the experience is so otherworldly the three of us might be&nbsp;beaming in from different planets.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/marriage-feels-like-a-hostage-situation-and-motherhood-a-curse-japanese-author-sayaka-murata">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/sayaka-murata">Sayaka Murata</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction-in-translation">Fiction in translation</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/world/japan">Japan</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/world/asia-pacific">Asia Pacific</category> <pubDate>Sat, 19 Apr 2025 10:00:37 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/marriage-feels-like-a-hostage-situation-and-motherhood-a-curse-japanese-author-sayaka-murata</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b29bf004078ade015b98b6af43ff07a14d69928c/742_134_2635_1581/master/2635.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=108027752909f8295f1038692b5b1124"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bungeishunju Ltd</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b29bf004078ade015b98b6af43ff07a14d69928c/742_134_2635_1581/master/2635.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d1ae7733a070bfea718a043cc70a2121"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bungeishunju Ltd</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Lisa Allardice</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-19T10:00:37Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Novelist Kiley Reid: ‘Consumption cannot fix racism’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/novelist-kiley-reid-come-and-get-it-paperback-interview</link> <description><p>The American author on the follow-up to her bestselling debut Such a Fun Age, why she loves characters you want to shake, and reading 160 novels for the Booker prize</p><p>When Arizona-raised novelist <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/27/kiley-reid-interview-such-a-fun-age">Kiley Reid</a>, 37, debuted five years ago with <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/such-a-fun-age-by-kiley-reid-review">Such a Fun Age</a></em>, she attained the kind of commercial and critical success that can jinx a second book, even landing a spot on the 2020 Booker longlist. Instead, <em><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/come-and-get-it-9781526632579/">Come and Get It</a></em> – which is published in paperback next month – fulfils the promise, pursuing some of the themes of that first work while also daring to be boldly different.</p><p>The story unfolds at the University of Arkansas, where wealth, class and race shape the yearnings and anxieties of a group of students and one equally flawed visiting professor. Reid, who has been teaching at the University of Michigan, is currently preparing to move to the Netherlands with her husband and young daughter. She is also on the judging panel for this year’s Booker prize.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/novelist-kiley-reid-come-and-get-it-paperback-interview">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/kiley-reid">Kiley Reid</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Sat, 19 Apr 2025 17:00:44 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/novelist-kiley-reid-come-and-get-it-paperback-interview</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7b3ea2a03016f0d76dd31a9cf0f772d42475aeb5/0_2420_7554_4533/master/7554.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=69cc50468d80c37ca82e2858f592d95c"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7b3ea2a03016f0d76dd31a9cf0f772d42475aeb5/0_2420_7554_4533/master/7554.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d145380c025b40c7a266214944e5569c"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Hephzibah Anderson</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-19T17:00:44Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/12/novelist-katie-kitamura-as-trump-tries-to-take-away-everything-i-love-its-never-been-clearer-that-writing-matters</link> <description><p>The Japanese-American author of unsettling new novel Audition talks about why fiction isn’t frivolous, family life with fellow writer Hari Kunzru, and how US authors are facing a critical moment</p><p>Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.”</p><p>The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad?</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/12/novelist-katie-kitamura-as-trump-tries-to-take-away-everything-i-love-its-never-been-clearer-that-writing-matters">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump">Donald Trump</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/trump-administration">Trump administration</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-politics">US politics</category> <pubDate>Sat, 12 Apr 2025 08:00:40 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/12/novelist-katie-kitamura-as-trump-tries-to-take-away-everything-i-love-its-never-been-clearer-that-writing-matters</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5e8e6d96883ae3d2475dd43b21621d536389bd27/525_373_2862_1717/master/2862.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=9264ae069a19d3097be2bd74a39e3aae"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5e8e6d96883ae3d2475dd43b21621d536389bd27/525_373_2862_1717/master/2862.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=39e7bd037b4c7619609f4ca3a79501c9"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Sophie McBain</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-12T08:00:40Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Kaliane Bradley: ‘I dreaded the book going to people I know’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/12/kaliane-bradley-the-ministry-of-time-paperback-interview</link> <description><p>The author of bestseller The Ministry of Time on how lockdown telly, Terry Pratchett and her Cambodian heritage shaped her Arctic time travel tale</p><p>Kaliane Bradley, 36, lives in east London and works as an editor at Penguin Classics. Her debut novel, <em><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/the-ministry-of-time-9781399726368/">The Ministry of Time</a> </em>(Sceptre), was published last year to critical acclaim and a place in the bestseller charts and is out in paperback now. It’s a vivid time travel tale following Lieutenant Graham Gore, a crew member of Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition, who is brought back to life in the 21st century as part of a government experiment. He develops an unlikely relationship with his “bridge”, a contemporary character helping him assimilate to the modern world. It was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/04/womens-prize-for-fiction-reveals-longlist-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-miranda-july-elizabeth-strout">longlisted</a> for the 2025 women’s prize for fiction and the BBC has commissioned a TV adaptation.</p><p><strong>What has the </strong><strong>past year been like for you?<br></strong>Lovely and discombobulating. I veer wildly between immense gratitude and intense impostor syndrome. But I’m still working 4.5 days a week, so I’m grounded by my job.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/12/kaliane-bradley-the-ministry-of-time-paperback-interview">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/orange-prize-for-fiction">Women's prize for fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fantasy">Fantasy books</category> <pubDate>Sat, 12 Apr 2025 17:00:51 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/12/kaliane-bradley-the-ministry-of-time-paperback-interview</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/85b3e1376cd86dc26db2edcf2cf685e56048c4c7/0_37_7360_4417/master/7360.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=7da854913d5cf9777c42a34aaedce713"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/85b3e1376cd86dc26db2edcf2cf685e56048c4c7/0_37_7360_4417/master/7360.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=52725bf569b7b9090ee8c1cbfdd26672"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Ellen Peirson-Hagger</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-12T17:00:51Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Novelist Oisín Fagan: ‘I was at the altar of literature and had its fire in me’</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/05/writer-oisin-fagan-edens-shore-nobber-hostages</link> <description><p>The Irish author on his new ‘violent seafaring epic’, his appetite for body horror and living his entire life book-first</p><p>Oisín Fagan, 33, grew up in County Meath and lives in Dublin. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize with his first novel, <em><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/nobber-9781529329810/">Nobber</a></em>, about the Black Death’s arrival in the Irish village that gives the book its title. His other books include the 2016 story collection <em><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/hostages-9781788546683">Hostages</a></em>, described by the <em>Spectator</em> as “DayGlo-Breugelish nightmares”; Ferdia Lennon calls him “one of the most strikingly original Irish writers working today”. His new novel, <em><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/edens-shore-9781399815901/">Eden’s Shore</a></em>, is a violent seafaring epic centred on a Spanish colony in Latin America at the end of the 18th century.<br><br><strong>How did this book begin for you?</strong><br> It’s a confluence of things I’ve been interested in all my life: Latin American literature, history, revolutionary politics, spirituality. Like <em>Nobber</em>, it’s about a dying town with a proliferation of characters, which I like. That’s not new – it’s Balzac, it’s Dickens – but for some reason we’ve distilled novels down to chamber pieces of six or seven characters; to me, that’s theatre, which I also love, but novels can proliferate horizontally in a way that other forms can’t.<br><br><strong>What draws you to set your novels in the past?</strong><br> You can do things with language and form that might not be as accepted in contemporary work, but I don’t see myself as a historical novelist. Literary fiction seems quite contemporary at the moment; historical fiction seems to be slipping into “genre”, like fantasy. In other parts of the world, it’s just part of literary fiction. We’re living through a moment in Irish literature with a lot of very good Irish writers who are all very different and talented, but maybe they’re not experimenting in genre as much as they would do elsewhere in the world. Because I find myself an Irishman among these people, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s different.’ In the 1960s in America, or Latin America in the 50s and 70s, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he’s just one of the lads.’</p><p><strong>There are some pretty grisly scenes here. What were they like to write?</strong><br> The nuts and bolts of novel formation are difficult for me – setting up a scene, getting from one place to another – but give me someone picking bullets out of someone’s gut and I think: here we fucking go. I’m writing for these moments where the body becomes real. Like, the eyeball scene... you should’ve seen the 300 words that were deleted; you’d have been seeing it for the rest of your life. I love my cousin to bits, but he had this fear of eyes as a child; mention the word “eye” and you’d see him kind of flinch. I tapped into that.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/05/writer-oisin-fagan-edens-shore-nobber-hostages">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Sat, 05 Apr 2025 17:00:27 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/05/writer-oisin-fagan-edens-shore-nobber-hostages</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8eb79b131dab72992e290491688fb994a9900bd3/0_95_4500_2700/master/4500.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=0930496c747b30f10b46e235f9fb8421"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Patrick Bolger</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8eb79b131dab72992e290491688fb994a9900bd3/0_95_4500_2700/master/4500.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=4257bee8d1848cb355de59cf3b870ab0"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Patrick Bolger</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Anthony Cummins</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-04-05T17:00:27Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Better at everything: how AI could make human beings irrelevant</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/04/the-big-idea-can-we-stop-ai-making-humans-obsolete</link> <description><p>The end of civilisation might look less like a war, and more like a love story. Can we avoid being willing participants in our own downfall?</p><p>Right now, most big AI labs have a team figuring out ways that rogue AIs might escape supervision, or secretly collude with each other against humans. But there’s a more mundane way we could lose control of civilisation: we might simply become obsolete. This wouldn’t require any hidden plots – if AI and robotics keep improving, it’s what happens by default.</p><p>How so? Well, AI developers are firmly on track to build better replacements for humans in almost every role we play: not just economically as <a href="https://www.artisan.co/">workers</a> and decision-makers, but culturally as artists and creators, and even socially as friends and romantic <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.19096">companions</a>. What place will humans have when AI can do everything we do, only better?</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/04/the-big-idea-can-we-stop-ai-making-humans-obsolete">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai">Artificial intelligence (AI)</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/technology">Technology</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/computing">Computing</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/society/society">Society</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/law/human-rights">Human rights</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Sun, 04 May 2025 13:00:07 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/04/the-big-idea-can-we-stop-ai-making-humans-obsolete</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/fc6d524fdb21a71d6069e0f3eafc81b37e09ab8d/0_1_2160_1296/master/2160.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e8964b312f7e78c22d5ff554bb0d2dcd"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/fc6d524fdb21a71d6069e0f3eafc81b37e09ab8d/0_1_2160_1296/master/2160.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6d59f9213ed69b58bb8bc29a2b1d8cc7"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>David Duvenaud</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-04T13:00:07Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff audiobook review – a fugitive’s fight for survival</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/08/the-vaster-wilds-by-lauren-groff-audiobook-review-a-fugitives-fight-for-survival</link> <description><p>Actor January LaVoy narrates the visceral story of a girl on the run in a winter wilderness, in early 17th-century Virginia</p><p>At the start of The Vaster Wilds, we meet a servant girl, “bony and childish small”, on the run from a disease-ridden English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. The reason for her flight is not immediately disclosed, though her fingernails are tellingly bloody. Armed with a knife, a thick cloak stolen from her mistress and leather boots taken from a dead child, she heads out into the winter wilderness. There, in the face of ice storms, potentially hostile Powhatan villages and a soldier charged with task of capturing her “living or dead”, she must be fearless and resourceful to stay alive.</p><p>Lauren Groff’s vivid and visceral story of survival – think Man vs Wild meets The Revenant – is set in the early 17th century when smallpox and starvation pose the greatest threat to life. Our protagonist, formerly the child of a prostitute living in a London poorhouse, was given the name Lamentation as an infant but has spent most of her life known as “girl” – “Think not of it, girl,” she murmurs while contemplating the bleakness of her situation. We follow her as she builds fires, skins squirrels, forages for grubs and berries and sprints across frozen rivers, her plight set against the deprivation and patriarchal violence of the so-called new world.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/08/the-vaster-wilds-by-lauren-groff-audiobook-review-a-fugitives-fight-for-survival">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/books">Books</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/books/fiction">Fiction</category> <pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2025 14:00:32 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/08/the-vaster-wilds-by-lauren-groff-audiobook-review-a-fugitives-fight-for-survival</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2738ba9a7ded67dec95faf5c1ce5dc5549000283/0_200_6000_3600/master/6000.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=fab071b65508f7607074c60a5de95d68"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: vvvita/Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2738ba9a7ded67dec95faf5c1ce5dc5549000283/0_200_6000_3600/master/6000.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=44c33cd47f70ae69bc65eea6ba47e03e"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: vvvita/Alamy</media:credit> </media:content> <dc:creator>Fiona Sturges</dc:creator> <dc:date>2025-05-08T14:00:32Z</dc:date> </item> </channel></rss> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
Download the "valid RSS" banner.
Upload the image to your own server. (This step is important. Please do not link directly to the image on this server.)
Add this HTML to your page (change the image src attribute if necessary):
If you would like to create a text link instead, here is the URL you can use:
http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=https%3A//www.theguardian.com/books/rss
