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From dystopian Australian cli-fi to essential essays about Black Britain and Jack Reacher’s thrilling debut – authors, critics and booksellers all have a single recommendationAccording to new data from YouGov, 40% of British adults have not read a single book in the last year, with the median Briton having read or listened to three. In a world where there are so many other distractions and forms of entertainment to choose from, fewer and fewer people are getting stuck into books – yet lots of us would like to be reading more. So we asked authors, booksellers and critics to choose the book they think you should read this year – even if you only read one.*** Continue reading...

The median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past 12 months with reading habits also split along gender, class and political dividesAccording to new a polling by YouGov 40% of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year.The median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past year, the survey found. Continue reading...

A doctor draws on science, history, art and her own experiences to help us see human anatomy anewUntil the early 17th century, scientists believed that the heart operated a bit like a lamp, warming blood that had been produced by the liver. In 1616, when the English physician William Harvey corrected this misconception and explained how the heart works, the audience at the Royal College of Physicians booed him. Why did it take so long for scientists to understand the heart’s real function? One possibility is that until the invention of mechanical pumps in the late 16th century, doctors lacked the metaphorical language to describe what the heart does.“The truth of the body is as much about storytelling as it is about anatomy,” the writer and surgeon Gabriel Weston argues in Alive, an unusual and gripping book that she describes as an “ecumenical exploration” of her subject. An English graduate, in her early 20s Weston enrolled in a pioneering medical degree programme designed to encourage arts students to become doctors. She believes clinical medicine has much to learn from the humanities. When anatomy textbooks show organs and body parts in isolation, removed from the individual and their wider context, Weston believes they miss important truths. Bodies are, after all, not purely mechanical entities. And so Alive, a book that draws on science, history, philosophy and art, is as much about what our bodies mean to us, how they feel to us, as what they do. Continue reading...

From youthful curiosity to midlife resignation, the protagonist is buffeted by forces beyond his control in this thrilling exploration of what it means to be aliveSamuel Butler’s 1903 novel The Way of All Flesh carried with it an implied subtitle. In the book of Kings, from which Butler drew his title, the dying David tells his son Solomon, “take thou courage and shew thyself a man”. Butler’s inference was clear enough: here is a book about what it means to live, what it means to die, and what might be a worthwhile way to fill the time in between.Flesh, the sixth book from Booker-shortlisted David Szalay, has more than just a biblical allusion in common with Butler’s masterpiece. Thrillingly, in an age when we arguably have weaker stomachs for such things, it also shares its bold ontological and artistic ambitions. In Flesh, Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Important collection of author’s letters and manuscripts, being sold in April, reveals his loathing of sloppiness and love of languageJRR Tolkien was so irritated by a careless typist’s slapdash work on one of his manuscripts that he vented his frustration in a letter that has come to light.The Lord of the Rings author said in despair: “She reduced [my manuscript] to nonsense. I have some sympathy with the typist faced with such unfamiliar matter; though evidently she wasn’t paying much attention.” Continue reading...

The Guardian long read writer’s ‘enthralling’ first book was said to reach ‘the highest literary eminence’ by judging chair Bill BrysonA book by a Guardian long read writer about the true story of a couple who were lost at sea for 118 days in the 70s after their boat was struck by a whale has won the Nero Gold prize.Sophie Elmhirst was presented with the £30,000 award for her book Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening. Continue reading...

The author’s motion to dismiss argued that the case should be heard in New Zealand, where the alleged abuse took place, and called accuser Scarlett Pavlovich ‘a fantasist’Neil Gaiman has asked a US district court to throw out a civil lawsuit accusing him of rape and sexual assault, filed last month by a woman who previously worked for the author and his former partner, Amanda Palmer.The motion to dismiss, filed on Tuesday, argued that the case should be heard in New Zealand, where the alleged abuse took place, rather than in the US. Continue reading...

Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsIn Naomi Klein’s most recent book Doppelganger, she talks about Philip Roth quite a lot, which made me realise that though I read quite a lot of Roth as a teenager, I hadn’t read American Pastoral, which is often considered his greatest novel. So I read it and it was great – I had forgotten how funny Roth is. Continue reading...

In this forthright account of his diagnosis and treatment, Steel wrings humour from the horror while honouring friends found and lost – and the significance of the NHSIt starts with a lump on the neck, noticed while shaving and briefly ignored; progresses via a bewilderment of bureaucratic processes to a “gloriously jolly radiologist” dispatching him for a biopsy; and quickly, although not without the delays and mishaps of a painfully overstretched system, lands up with comedian Mark Steel being handed a cancer diagnosis. When Steel asks the consultant whether his tumour is likely to prove fatal, the doctor replies “Touch wood”, and then actually touches some wood; at least, his patient notes, he was being professional about it. Maybe if the cancer had spread, Steel reflects, “they’d offer a more extreme approach and get me to pick up a penny and pass a black cat”.Cancer is common, and accounts of experiencing its arrival, treatment and – if you’re fortunate – aftermath are hardly rare. But this is not to suggest memoir fatigue. People, and illness itself, are infinitely various, and each chronicle reveals something different in between what have become the tropes of the genre: the shock of the news, the emotional and physical reserves required to endure treatment, the almost inevitably altered perspective on one’s own life and on more existential questions of life and death themselves.The Leopard in My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland by Mark Steel is published by Ebury (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

A gripping study of the CIA smuggling operation to get banned books behind the iron curtainIn March 1984 Polish customs officers noticed a suspicious truck. It had arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen, docking at the Baltic port of Świnoujście. The truck’s interior was smaller than its exterior. Workmen broke through a walled-off inside panel. To their surprise, they found a cache of books – 800 of them – and illicit printing presses. And forbidden walkie-talkies. “Oh shit! Reactionary propaganda!” the officer exclaimed.The shipment was to be delivered to the Polish opposition movement Solidarity. The country’s communist leader, Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski, had banned Solidarity three years earlier. The forbidden books included critiques of the socialist system and pamphlets on human rights. Other works smuggled behind the iron curtain included Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, philosophical texts by Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, and copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly. Continue reading...

Beaty Rubens’s study of the impact of early radio broadcasts in Britain is full of fascinating and often poignant detailOne hundred years ago this summer, from high above Daventry in Northamptonshire, voices began to beam into the homes of 20 million people. They came from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter – truly revolutionary technology in 1925 – which opened with a new work, Daventry Calling, by the poet Alfred Noyes.“Sitting around your hearth/Ye are at one with all on earth,” the poem concluded, giving a utopian flavour that recurs often through Beaty Rubens’s meticulously detailed, engaging book. Exploring how radio transformed the lives of Britons between the two world wars, it’s a striking read in our smartphone-dominated world, as we witness another radical invention quickly becoming part of everyday life. A portal into other places from your own house was also an easy concept to sell. Take the cover of the first Christmas issue of Radio Times from 1923, one of many fascinating images in the book, showing a rapt family gathering around their small set. Continue reading...

A humble neighbourhood eatery in Vienna is the hub for a moving exploration of everyday urban existence in a new novel by the International Booker-shortlisted Austrian authorOn the face of it, Robert Seethaler’s new book might seem twee. The novel – an instant hit upon its German publication in 2023 – is set in Vienna in 1966. It tells of Robert Simon, who follows a long-held dream when he gives up doing odd jobs around the market to set up a cafe, which becomes a hub of community.But Seethaler’s prose is unexpected, taking the novel, far from being an easy-sailing story of the simple joys of community-building, somewhere knottier. The author, whose previous works include the International Booker-shortlisted A Whole Life and the German bestseller The Tobacconist, was himself born in Vienna in 1966 – and so the story, set over a decade, tracks the modernising city of his childhood. The cafe sits on the corner of Karmelitermarkt in Leopoldstadt – the historic Jewish district after which Tom Stoppard named his 2020 play. Continue reading...