More from Books
Back from the beyond: The Book of Love, by Kelly Link, reviewed
Three adolescents reappear in their home town on the Massachusetts coast, having been presumed dead – which is closer to the truth than their families realise
The truth one year, heresy the next: The Book of Days, by Francesca Kay, reviewed
A richly imagined novel unfolds in an Oxfordshire village as the accession of the child king Edward VI brings another round of ‘newfanglery’ in religion
The magic and mystery of Georgia: Hard by a Great Forest, by Leo Vardiashvili, reviewed
Homesick after 20 years in London, Irakli returns to his Caucasian roots and promptly disappears. Can Saba, his youngest son, track him down against the odds?
Three men in exile: My Friends, by Hisham Matar, reviewed
Terror of discovery by the Libyan authorities haunts Khaled, Hosam and Mustafa after their protests against Gaddafi make their return home impossible
Escape into fantasy: My Heavenly Favourite, by Lucas Rijneveld, reviewed
The 14-year-old daughter of a Dutch farmer is pursued by a paedophile vet and tries hard to combat the abuse by imagining she’s a bird
An insider’s account of the CCP’s stranglehold on China
A high-ranking intelligence officer leaves a cache of letters revealing his increasing disenchantment with the party after being purged numerous times
A Guardsman’s life as not as glamorous as it might seem
Besides taking part in dangerous operational tours abroad, units of the Household Division keep up a gruelling schedule of ceremonial duties at home
Secrets of the dorm: Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid, reviewed
An academic who also writes a column for a teen magazine eavesdrops on the conversations of rich university students and reproduces them for readers to sneer at
Have we all become slaves to algorithms?
Kyle Chayka sees their constant feeds as flattening our lives, but the spread of Americanisation, which began long before the internet, is the real steamroller
Conrad Black adheres firmly to the ‘great man’ view of history
The movers and shakers of Volume I of his projected history of the world are Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal rather than any socio-economic forces
Mystery in everyday objects
Household gadgets take on a sense of wonder or menace for Lara Pawson, who sees a porpoise’s dorsal fin in the dial of a toaster and a hand grenade in a pepper mill
The strangeness of Charles III
‘He can cry at a sunset’, says one courtier of the King. A bullied child and an intellectual among George Formby fans, Charles dreams of gardening and plants mazes
How Liverpool soon outgrew the Beatles
For the bands playing at Eric’s, the celebrated Merseyside punk club of the late 1970s, even to own a Beatles record was considered embarrassing
Life is a far richer, more complicated affair than we imagined
Exploring the new biology, Philip Hall explains how genes do not in fact determine our fate, and how cells can be reprogrammed to perform all kinds of new tasks
Flirting in 15th-century Florence
In his history of male-male sexual relations, Noel Malcolm describes how a man in Renaissance Italy would seduce a boy in the street by seizing his hat and holding it ransom
The summer I dwelt in marble halls
Gill Johnson recalls the glorious months she once spent in the ‘gilded labyrinth’ of a Venetian palazzo, employed as an English tutor to an aristocratic Italian family
A redemptive fable: Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips, reviewed
Set in the Appalachian Mountains, the novel centres around a family struggling to survive domestic abuse and abandonment in the aftermath of the American civil war
Musings in lockdown: The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed
Marooned in Manhattan with a stoned student and precocious parrot for company, our elderly narrator despairs of the novel’s future when life is so much stranger than fiction
Refugee lives: The Singularity, by Balsam Karam, reviewed
The stories of two tragic mothers are interwoven in a haunting novel revolving around war, displacement, despair and the loss of children
How The Sopranos changed TV for ever
Peter Biskind describes how a once despised medium became the definitive narrative art form of the early 21st century. But has it now passed its peak?
Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed
A lonely teenager on holiday in Italy befriends his grandparents’ elderly gardener and slowly coaxes out his painful memories of betrayals and reprisals during the war
Ménage à trois: Day, by Michael Cunningham, reviewed
When Dan, his wife Isabel and her brother Robbie decide to spend lockdown together, claustrophobic domesticity develops into a painful love triangle
The proposed cities of the future look anything but modern
The vision for California Forever, an American utopian city still at planning stage, is pure picture-book nostalgia of bicycles, rowing boats and tree-lined streets
Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man
Descriptions of the gifted author tearing up the literary landscape of the late 20th century are deeply poignant when set alongside Kureishi’s recent despatches from hospital
Downhill all the way: the decline of the British Empire after 1923
Matthew Parker gives us snapshots of Britain’s sprawling dominions in September 1923, showing both governors and governed increasingly questioning the purpose of the empire
