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The actors are lending their supporting to the campaign by Wordsworth’s great great great great granddaughter to keep Rydal Mount in the Lake District open to the public Actors Brian Cox, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Conti as well as the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce are among those calling for the home of William Wordsworth to be saved as a site of literary heritage.The Romantic poet lived at Rydal Mount in the Lake District from 1813 to his death in 1850. The property has five acres of gardens which were designed by Wordsworth. Continue reading...

Korean retailers report strong sales for Light and Thread, featuring speeches, essays and poems by novelistA book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel prize lecture sold 10,000 copies in its first day on sale online.Light and Thread, which takes its title from Han’s December lecture, is her first book to be published in South Korea since she was announced as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature last October. Continue reading...

A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and moreGozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99When 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.Leave the Trees, Please by Benjamin Zephaniah, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon, Magic Cat, £12.99Zephaniah’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. Continue reading...

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 writersWith 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.***People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is. Continue reading...

A social and personal history that refuses to gloss over the rage, envy and hurt that form part of every close bondFalling out with a friend can feel 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.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 female friendship, and that leaves every woman feeling inadequate. Continue reading...

The author’s hypnotic reading evokes the desires and existential crisis of a 45-year-old woman on a wild road trip In the second novel by writer, actor and film-maker Miranda July, a nameless Los Angeles-based artist who has had success “in several mediums” leaves behind her husband, Harris, and their young child, Sam, to drive across America. She is due at a meeting in New York and has decided to get there via a leisurely road trip. But what starts off as a fleeting break from the mundanity of marriage and motherhood turns into a wild and wonderfully odd unravelling. Just half an hour into her journey, she impulsively leaves the freeway and checks into a scruffy motel. There she is electrified by a younger car hire worker who has “a Huckleberry Finn/Gilbert Blythe look that I used to flip out over as a teenager.” After the two lock eyes while he squeegees her windscreen (not a euphemism), she decides to pursue him in an unusually chaste love affair.All Fours – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for fiction – is narrated by July whose pacy, hypnotic reading skilfully evokes the internal monologue of her protagonist, who pinballs between drily funny and existentially bereft. The book has been called a menopause novel on the basis that it centres on a 45-year-old dismayed at being halfway through her life and past her peak (both her grandmother and aunt killed themselves and she worries she is next in line). But there’s more than just dwindling oestrogen in this frank and subversive tale which reflects on desire, freedom and creativity, and shines a light on the complex inner life of a woman. Continue reading...

This outrageous skewering of the modern dating landscape confronts toxic masculinity and the contradictions of female desireNearly every page in Sophie Kemp’s debut is smart, jarring and wickedly funny. Set in Brooklyn in 2019, this wild, absurdist take on the millennial novel tracks the adventures of Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old waterslide commercial actor and zine-maker who determines to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time”, after her drug-dealing sex partner, Emil, casually suggests that she gets herself a man. Prior to that point, Reality had just been living her life, no strings attached. “Would having a special guy around really make me happier? Was this the life purpose I was looking for?” A boyfriend, she decides, might “add colour to my life as well as provide intrigue”. And, New York City being “a place where nefarious individuals got ideas”, he could also protect her from “getting raped so much”.Reality’s quest kicks off with a hunt for “intel”. Where do guys who make good boyfriends usually spend their time? Farcical as it is, her inquiry touches on that most sobering of cliches about true love: that it is darn hard to find. Emil responds with confusion: “Where do they hang out? Girl, I think you’re sexy as fuck and fun, but for serious, you are on some sort of insane-ass trip these days. They’re not a pack of wildebeests in the plains.” Desperate for better advice, Reality turns to Girlfriend Weekly, Kemp’s cheeky homage to the time-honoured world of women’s magazines. It has all the answers she’s looking for, even if they are hilariously fusty and over the top: “Bring a little charm with you everywhere that you go. For example, when you are at the grocer’s, be sure to give a smile and a wink to the dashing gentleman in the porkpie hat. Say: ‘Gee whiz, woo-woo, you are a beautiful specimen and I am a virgin.’” Continue reading...

A journalist’s bracingly honest account of interviews with musicians from Brian May to Shaun RyderWhen 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 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.”Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D’Arby. 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. Continue reading...

The poet’s debut novel is a transcendent portrait of gay desire that pays homage to the English literary tradition Seán Hewitt, the author of two acclaimed poetry collections and an equally acclaimed memoir, now publishes his debut novel Open, Heaven – a tender, skilled and epiphanic work which I suspect will meet the same response. It takes its title from William Blake’s poem Milton, which speaks of wandering through “realms of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty” – a line that quite nicely describes the reader’s experience of this book.Its opening recalls – with the sense of a deliberate engagement with literary tradition – TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, or LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly … the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms in reverse.” Our narrator James, a librarian who loved but never desired his husband, is a man arrested in time past. Directed by doctors to rest after the “bewildered weeks” that follow his divorce, he returns endlessly to thoughts of his youth, “hoping to find the answer to something left unfinished”. He searches online for properties in the village of Thornmere, where he was once a solitary teen who loved – with disastrous single-minded loyalty – a boy called Luke. He discovers a farmhouse for sale which is achingly familiar; so he is prompted to return to Thornmere in person, having never really departed it in spirit, and we are plunged into the body of the novel. Continue reading...

A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitiousThis is not a self-help book,” the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history”). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers” by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition” of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours. Continue reading...

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 personSilvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: “affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk”. As 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 protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.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 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. Continue reading...

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in printYou may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish” might be written with a “gh”, as in “rough”, an “o”, as in “women”, and a “ti”, as in “lotion”.The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through” to “though” and “trough”, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways. Continue reading...