More from Books
Stark realities
Lawyers, teachers, architects and engineers all enjoy sex behind the scenes at a Houston gay bar in a novel focusing on relationships among black urban men
Hogging the limelight
Contemplating ‘hedgehog philosophy’ with Sarah Sands, Rowan Williams, Greta Thunberg and other luminaries would test anyone’s patience after 150 pages
Blow your mind
The UK seems on the brink of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’ – but, stripped of shamanic ritual and sanitised for medicinal purposes, will psilocybin retain its power?
Lies and extremism
The demonisation of the state of Israel is basically an anti-Semitic mutation ‘evolving out of reach’, argues Jake Wallis Simons, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle
Passchendaele all over again
When Allied forces landed at Salerno on 9 September, they expected an easy run to Rome. But the intelligence proved dangerously faulty, as James Holland explains
Rising star
The second volume of Knausgaard’s trilogy serves as a prequel to the first, tracing the origins of Norway’s ominous new celestial body
Hell on Earth
More than 100 interviews with surviving detainees and former prison workers reveal how profoundly shocking President Assad’s regime continues to be
Drowning in the typing pool
For decades, undereducated girls were thwarted before they even started in the workplace, living in the slipstream of men and drip-fed with a sense of their own uselessness
The view from the lab
The neuroscientist Camilla Nord places considerable emphasis on scanning technology, but has disappointingly little to suggest in the way of effective new treatments
Two for the road
Jane Glover follows the rapturous Wolfgang around Venice, Bologna, Florence and Naples on three journeys that would change the young composer’s life
A world of your own
How the search for a birthday present led to the founding of a unique business
Hope in hell
Brought up by a tyrannical father in the postcard beauty of Montego Bay, this is a story of the author’s salvation through literature and the ferocity of maternal love
The sacred and profane
The great American writer is ill-served by this new biography – but luckily we still have her own writing to tell us who she truly was
Life class
Essays by Michael Peppiatt on the artists who quicken his heart, and encounters between Richard Cork and his favourites, including Jasper Johns, Henry Moore and Gilbert & George
Solo sisters
Gertrude Bell travelled extensively through Turkey before and after the first world war and the author plays dogged detective in her wake
Cut to the chase
It’s a brilliant page-turner device and works perfectly in stories set variously during the Algerian war of independence of the 1950s and Norfolk and London in the present day
Monkey business
A labyrinthine plot involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy clan form the basis of the latest in James Ellroy’s planned new ‘LA Quintet’
Hail dairy
A lifetime obsession with milk has resulted in 350 numbered, lightly edited and loosely connected remarks about milk, its colour, its smell and much else. Weird or what?
The pen and the plant
A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them
Parallel lives
Aged 69, the travel writer had a stroke and spent his last 20 years as a hemiplegic – and writing this memoir of his father’s life intertwined with snapshots of his own
The greed and the glory
The American author turns her attention to colonial injustice in a tale about a servant girl who flees a blighted English settlement in 17th-century Jamestown
Love in Middle England
A delicate, funny and generous-hearted novel about thwarted love and its aftermath in a 1960s Middle England
Double trouble
Naomi Klein had got used to being confused with Naomi Wolf. Then Covid hit and it was no longer a joke
Quiet brilliance
The author once takes a big issue and, with her characteristic quiet brilliance, illuminates it in a small homely setting
Word association
From an employee of a tram company in Birkenhead to the deeply eccentric Alexander Ellis, a celebration of the army of unpaid contributors to the first edition of the OED
