Interesting Ideas

For all of humanity’s many, many flaws, one of our most redeeming characteristics as a species is an almost-universal desire to connect with one another. When terrible things happen and communities find themselves under threat, people invariably step up and offer to help. Beloved children’s television star Fred Rogers famously told us to “Look for […]

The morning after Trump was elected for the first time, Quaker elders, radical Black youth, anarchists, parents and toddlers circled around my woodstove to continue planning our solidarity action against the Dakota Access Pipeline. We passed my six-week old baby around and talked about the election, about Standing Rock, about future plans and possibilities. A […]

It’s a funny time to think about national reading habits. I’ve been looking for escape pods, personally. Books that take me far from this particular time and zip code. Perhaps riding the same wave, our friends at The Drift dedicated a recent issue to literature in translation. In a summary note, the editors laid a […]

Nicci French’s latest gem; an unsettling brainteaser from Japanese enigma Uketsu; the tensions that mar the maiden voyage of an airship; and a sojourn on a scary Scottish island

I try not to repeat myself too much when it comes to the authors I pick for this column. But there is one name I always make an exception for: Nicci French, because this husband and wife duo just keep going from strength to strength. Their latest, The Last Days of Kira Mullan (Simon & Schuster), follows Nancy North, who is recovering from a mental breakdown and being cared for solicitously by her boyfriend, Felix, as they move to a new flat in Harlesden, north-west London. She meets her new neighbours – including, briefly, Kira, whom she bumps into the evening before Kira is found dead by her own hand. Nancy, though, doesn’t believe Kira took her own life, and begins investigating when the police quickly close the case.

The trouble is, nobody takes Nancy seriously. Once people know about her illness, “they look at you in a different way. Every odd thing you do, anything you say, if you get a bit sad, a bit angry, people think that might be a sign of you going crazy again.” As she shouts into the void – “Being angry is not being haywire. Being suspicious is not being paranoid. Wanting answers is not a sign of paranoid delusion” – her life begins to unravel. This is the pair’s 26th novel, and they are still keeping me up far too late, rushing through the pages in a panicky, obsessive fashion as I race to the conclusion.

January is a notoriously dismal month, but it’s also an exciting time for books, when the new year’s first great releases begin to tumble forth. Below are a few of the titles we’re most looking forward to in the early weeks of 2025.

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“Is it or is it not fascism” is a debate we’re going to be having a lot in the next few years, I’m afraid. And while there is perhaps an intellectual rigor to sussing out an answer, there are also things that are what they appear to be. Yesterday was a grim parade of slaps […]

From befriending the last African enslaved in the US to meeting with zombies in Haiti, the folklorist, anthropologist and Harlem Renaissance writer – who has a novel posthumously published today – was a sensitive chronicler of other people’s lives

Today, on what would have been Zora Neale Hurston’s 134th birthday, a posthumous novel by the American writer and cultural anthropologist has been published. The Life of Herod the Great, which Hurston was working on when she died in 1960, is a sequel to her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, and up until now has been accessible only to scholars. As readers get their hands on this final work, writer Colin Grant takes the opportunity to look back at some of the gems in Hurston’s long and varied career.

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All year long, BookBrowse Book Club members meet in our online forum to discuss the latest featured titles. In 2024, we’ve hosted stimulating discussions of 19 books, a couple of which are still in progress and all of which are available for you to browse in full. Below, we glance back over some of our most popular selections. We hope you enjoy perusing them and find them a useful resource (and inspiration!) for your own book club discussions. We look forward to the coming year and the future of our new forum, where members can not only join in on our planned discussions but have all kinds of conversations on book-related subjects. The forum is open to everyone to read and follow along, so please visit. If you’re excited about ... [More]

Well, here we are. Here is our world. Here is our next few years. Book people may not have as much economic or political power as other people in other industries, but we have some power. And if we don’t use the power we have, no matter how limited it may feel, how can we […]

Sara Sligar’s second novel follows a trend in novels—reviving classic plotlines in contemporary settings. Vantage Point was inspired by a 1798 Gothic horror classic. “The germ of the idea was wanting to write a modernization of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” Sligar explains. I was talking to a friend about how everyone keeps modernizing the same […]

RESPONDING TO THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: Kim Kelly on the how-tos and DOs and DON’Ts of mutual aid • Madeline ffitch on direct action and survival work in the face of fascism • Josh Cook on what the publishing industry can do in the face of authoritarianism. | Lit Hub Politics Henry Alford remembers how […]

Beecher’s beautiful memoir, written partly in response to the death of her brother aged 25, describes in startling detail the highs and lows of existence

The title of Anna Beecher’s first work of nonfiction can be read in various ways – an expression of triumph, relief or anticlimax. She uses it as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof.

In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths, and she and her friend return home carrying the weight of that knowledge. “Our lives are punctured by moments of impossibility when the future unlatches from the present and a gap opens, which we must find a way to step over,” she writes. Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents. “Looking back at this chain of non-disasters, from which all parties emerged bruised but alive, I now see loss,” she says. But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: “Little losses, against the vast loss of John.”

We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher is published by W&N (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Large, gruesome, brutal and gluttonous: Donald Trump is the archetypal ogre. So how did he manage to stomp back for a second term?

The animated film Shrek opens with the eponymous hero wiping his bottom on a book. Shrek then emerges from the toilet and we follow his swamp-savvy morning routine. He bathes his huge and oddly luminous body in mud. He brushes his teeth with slime. He kills fish for his supper with his flatulence. So far so good.

But Shrek’s life is about to be interrupted. Lord Farquaad, the punctilious local potentate, is rounding up various misfits and banishing them to Shrek’s swamp. The film has Shrek put up “keep out” signs; he dreams of building a wall; and he frightens anyone who comes into his swamp with fierce-but-fake-but-fierce shows of aggression. But it’s no good. Shrek soon feels himself overwhelmed by “squatters” (as he calls them) and is furious.

From a radical retelling of Huckleberry Finn to Al Pacino’s autobiography, novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the volumes they would love to find in their own stocking
Illustrations by Lehel Kovács

Author of the award-winning Brooklyn (Penguin) and Long Island(Picador)

This history of international justice is an important primer for our dark times and surprisingly optimistic about our chances of putting today’s despots in the dock

On a Monday morning last month the Russian general Igor Kirillov left his flat in Moscow. A powerful bomb hidden in an e-scooter blew him up. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it was behind the assassination. The previous day it had charged him with war crimes: the use of banned chemical weapons that had poisoned more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

His killing was a brutal extrajudicial moment. Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s embattled government has sought justice in two ways. Its agencies have targeted perpetrators responsible for murdering Ukrainians – the commanders who give orders, technicians who design long-range missiles used in nightly attacks.

A new Sally Rooney, the return of le Carré’s George Smiley, plus real-life revelations from Al Pacino and Salman Rushdie ... Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, memoir, children’s books and more

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – Justine Jordan picks this year’s highlights in fiction.

Cosy crime, eco-thrillers, political memoirs, YA fantasy: there’s something for everyone in our pick of the books to look out for in the months ahead

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
(Jonathan Cape, out now)

Salman Rushdie’s account of his near-fatal stabbing, a 360-degree view of Queen Elizabeth II and Al Pacino’s rags to riches career are among this year’s most compelling personal histories

There are myriad ways to tell the story of a life, as shown by this year’s best biographies. Craig Brown’s doorstopper A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate), about the reign of Elizabeth II, dispenses with linear storytelling in favour of a patchwork of diary entries, letters, vignettes, second-hand anecdotes and even dreams (the writer Paul Theroux once dreamed of being nestled in Her Majesty’s bosom). The result is an unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent book which, alert to the absurdities of the monarchy, reveals as much about how others saw the Queen as the woman herself.

Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman (Virago) is a rich and riveting portrait of another seemingly unknowable aristocrat. The daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, Harriman was, says Purnell, a canny diplomat who exerted remarkable influence on mid-20th-century politics through her three marriages and numerous affairs with powerful men (her lovers included a prince, a shipping magnate and a celebrated US broadcaster). Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz(Atlantic Books) is a luminous joint biography of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, inspired by newly unearthed correspondence between the two writers that reads like “a lovers’ quarrel”. Anolik traces both women’s lives and their fraught friendship in the late 60s and early 70s, which fell apart after Didion was hired to edit Babitz’s first book. Reader, she fired her.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from an examination of the British Empire to gripping crime novels

Reading books is a fulfilling, engaging pastime. Reading what other people have to say about books is just plain fun, and an enticing way to find your latest great read. BookBrowse's First Impressions program brings honest, informative reader reviews to discerning book lovers. By only accepting reviews from members, who receive books months ahead of publication, we ensure that the ratings and opinions given are free from outside influence and reflect the personal perspectives of readers. In 2024, our First Impressions readers reviewed more than 30 books. From those, we’ve chosen the most well reviewed selections to feature below. We hope you enjoy exploring these titles, plus the hundreds in our archives, and we look forward to bring... [More]

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

A new novel from Alan Hollinghurst is always an event, and in Our Evenings (Picador) he is at the top of his game, mapping Britain’s changing mores through the prisms of class, race, politics and sex in the memoir of a half-Burmese actor whose scholarship to public school catapults him into the world of privilege. Tender, elegiac and gorgeously attentive to detail, it’s a masterly evocation of the gay experience over the past half century.

Smell has an outsize effect on our thoughts and moods, so it’s worth paying more attention to it

If you have been on holiday recently, do you think you could recall and describe what the place smelled like? You probably don’t get asked that question very often. And yet, the characteristic smell of a place seems to contain its special essence. Photos can’t truly bring back the feeling of being there, but smell has that power.

Our sense of smell develops before we’re born, and it is strongly linked to brain centres associated with creating new memories and perceiving emotions and bodily sensations. As a result, smells can merge these together, forming vividly personal memories. Most of us have smells that act as a trigger, transporting us to another time and place; for some it is the ocean breeze in summer, for others it might be urban smells of coffee houses, exhaust fumes or a hot pavement on a sunny day. I remember moving to Chicago after completing my PhD in Sweden 15 years ago. In the taxi from the train station, amid the gloomy midwestern winter, I realised the entire city was doused in the most incredible chocolate smell. I opened the window and took a deep sniff. That familiar scent, coming from a chocolate factory on the west side of town, immediately made me feel at ease. I believe Proust was right when he wrote that smells contain “the vast structure of recollection”.

The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty—what deepens and extends it—is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m […]

That night in November 2009, Mika was scanning the internet for abandoned dogs. My obvious advice for anyone approaching those animal websites is that whatever you do, if you’re only fifty percent sure, don’t look. Once you’ve looked, you’re gone. You might as well start buying the food, the leashes, the beds, the toys, and […]

The former politics professor is right to defend free speech in our higher education system, but his argument is undermined by his hysterical tone and lack of nuance

Matt Goodwin is a former professor of politics at the University of Kent who took voluntary severance last year, following a series of controversial posts after the Stockport stabbings. He has said that his departure had nothing to do with his views on the unrest, but was instead prompted by his disillusionment with developments in academic and university life.

In Bad Education he lays out his antipathy towards modern trends in British universities, which he argues have been captured by “woke” ideas of social justice, and undermined by a consumer-driven coddling of students.

“The first time I heard ‘Both Sides Now’ was on the phone in 1967 during the middle of the night. I got a call from [singer-songwriter] Tom Rush, who was very excited. Tom, a great fan of Joni’s, had earlier introduced me to her and to her fine song ‘The Circle Game.’ “‘Joni has a […]

From a boy on a snowy midnight adventure to a gothic family caper via a young offender inspired by poetry, our critics pick their favourite titles of the year

• The best books to give as gifts this Christmas

In the imagination of a small child anything is possible. Animals talk, humans can fly and a bedroom can turn into a forest in the blink of an eye. And it’s in the place where a child’s everyday reality and wild fantasy overlap that great stories are often born: books about tigers unexpectedly popping by for tea, or a snowman springing to life in the night.

The American writer won the prestigious prize for Fierce Elegy, a collection informed by the deaths of his family members. He explains why poetry is like friendship – and why he loves small words

Winning the TS Eliot prize came as a shock to American poet Peter Gizzi. “I had zero expectations”, he says. “All I know is I was overwhelmed.” In fact, the 65-year-old says he almost cried when his name was read out for his collection Fierce Elegy.

When we talk the next day – Gizzi is speaking over Zoom from Valencia, where he flew to see family after attending the ceremony in London on Monday night – he is clearly still emotional. The prestigious poetry award holds particular significance for him, having long felt an affinity with TS Eliot. In fact, Gizzi and his friend, the poet and scholar JH Prynne, even went on a pilgrimage to the village that features in the final poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets.

As we review new titles at BookBrowse throughout the year, we also strive to bring you intriguing interviews with our featured authors. Author interviews can provide glimpses of the visions behind books we love, make us excited about reading books, and serve as enjoyable reading experiences in themselves, especially when they unfold as in-depth conversations between interviewers and writers. Below, we highlight just a few of our favorite Q&As with authors whose books we covered in 2024. 

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Each year, BookBrowse subscribers vote on the books that will make up the annual Top 20. Our 2024 list features an eclectic mix of writing and genres, covering books we’ve included in our twice-monthly e-zine as well as write-in nominations. Now, we're excited to bring you the awards for the highest-rated titles across four categories: Top Fiction, Top Nonfiction, Top Debut, and Top Young Adult.

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