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The novelist on the comfort of Dodie Smith, how Anne Tyler made her want to be a writer – and why she doesn’t reread booksMy earliest reading memoryMy parents read me most of the Dr Seuss books. My favourite was Ten Apples Up on Top, about a lion, a tiger and a dog counting apples. I can still conjure up the illustrations, including the last one where there’s an explosion of apples all over the page.My favourite book growing upThe Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was riveted by her descriptions of pioneer life and all the how-to information: how to build a log cabin, plough a field, make a ball out of a pig’s bladder. I suspect those books affected my approach to my own writing of historical fiction. Also I related to Laura’s bad-tempered rebelliousness compared with her perfect sister Mary. Continue reading...

The chill of the supernatural pervades these unsettling tales, following a settlement’s history from the deep past to the near futureThe quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed by those who have so far managed to escape its spell.So it is with Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border that forms the centrepiece of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new collection of linked stories. We first approach Barrowbeck in midwinter. In First Footing, Celtic farmers have been driven from their homes on the Welsh border by Anglo-Saxon invaders. Desperately seeking shelter, they stumble into a narrow valley in a state of near-starvation. Their leader seeks counsel from the gods of earth, wind and water on whether he and his people will be allowed to stay. They are granted that permission, on the understanding that they will not own the land but be servants of it. Continue reading...

Named after an Intel microprocessor, 8080 Books aims to ‘shorten the lag between the final manuscript and the book’s arrival in the marketplace’Microsoft has launched a new book imprint with the aim of printing faster than traditional publishers.Named after an Intel microprocessor, 8080 Books will publish titles focused on technology, science and business. Continue reading...

The former culture secretary’s ‘real-life political thriller’ takes in sex parties and pasta plotters – but raises more questions than it answersDoes Nadine Dorries know, in Downfall, she’s borrowing her title from a much-giffed film about the last days of Hitler? When the publishers blurb on the back that this is an “astonishing real-life political thriller”, do they mean its facts are as lurid as fiction, or are they trying to gloss the account as fiction to avert legal challenge? Why, in her anonymous, deep-throat encounters, do her sources tend to start by telling her how much they enjoyed her last book, The Plot?This is nominally the story of Christmas 2023 to July 2024, and how the so-called “pasta plotters” tried to get rid of Rishi Sunak. There is no way on God’s Earth you would ever get that from the narrative, which doubles back on itself so often, to praise and defend Boris Johnson and castigate his enemies, that you never have any idea where you are, chronologically, or what point Dorries is trying to land. It’s like trying to map terrain by following a dog. You have to take that time period, and that subject matter, on trust from the author, and I just cannot stress strongly enough how much you shouldn’t do that. Continue reading...

The author of Braiding Sweetgrass returns with visions of an ecologically-inspired alternative to consumerismWhen you look at a berry, what do you see? A snack, a storehouse of energy, a transformed flower, a commodity, a gift? In her latest book, the US botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer views a tiny fruit through all of these lenses, in the process illuminating much bigger questions about how we humans relate to plants, to the natural world and to each other.The Serviceberry builds on the blend of Indigenous and western ecological thought that has made Kimmerer – unexpectedly – one of the best known environmental writers working today. During the pandemic, her essay collection Braiding Sweetgrass, which entwined Indigenous American teachings on plants and the land with western botanical science, became a slow-burn bestseller. It began as an unsolicited 750-page manuscript submitted to the small Minneapolis-based publisher Milkweed in 2010, was published in 2013, and has now sold more than 2m copies worldwide, featuring on the reading lists of celebrities from Emma Watson to Björk, and inspiring the singer Camila Cabello to get a neck tattoo of the eponymous herb. Continue reading...

Everett’s novel, James, which focuses on Twain's enslaved character Jim, won the $10,000 prizePercival Everett has won the $10,000 National Book Award for fiction, one of the US’s most prestigious literary prizes, for James, his acclaimed reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.The 67-year-old author was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for James, which focuses on Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved character Jim. The Guardian’s Anthony Cummins called the book “gripping, painful, funny, horrifying” in his review. Continue reading...

Augusta Britt says relationship with then-married author, who died in 2023, began after they met at motel poolThe author Cormac McCarthy, who died last year aged 89, began a relationship with a 16-year-old when he was 42 and the woman became his “secret muse”, Vanity Fair has reported.The author of The Road and Suttree gave very few interviews, so little is known of his private life other than that he married three times and lived in Spain and Texas before settling in New Mexico. Continue reading...

The acclaimed Norwegian author explores the impact of childhood trauma in this portrait of a life lived in fear Stay With Me is a brief novel, but the whole is overshadowed by fear. The narrator, a Norwegian novelist living in Milan, recalls her childhood in the book’s opening pages, the constant threat of her father’s violence, its eruptions the more fearsome for being random, unpredictable. “The world was hard. Wrong was wrong. When it could have been right. Afraid was a state of being. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn’t be shed.”Hanne Ørstavik’s novel addresses the question of whether a fear that springs from such a deep well can ever be shed. The nameless narrator is a widow; a year earlier her husband, an Italian musician referred to as L, died far too young. She is not free of her grief, but she meets M, who at 35 is 17 years younger than she is, and embarks on an affair. He is removed from her world of music and literature and gallery openings; his ambition is to own a Land Rover Defender. The contrast frees her from herself to a certain extent, and what’s not to like about hot sex with a younger man? But she questions his desire for her and she comes to fear the rage that can erupt from him, an echo of what she witnessed as a little girl. Continue reading...

Grief rubs shoulders with greasy chip pans in a humorous and heartfelt celebration of the coastal working classAn ode to fish and chips, corn dollies and driving Ringtons tea vans, Wendy Pratt’s seventh poetry collection is a greasy but glorious celebration of the coastal working class. Her deliciously joyful outlook on life oozes gratitude and a sparkling sense of humour, hitting as sharply as the salty ocean breeze.Pratt grew up in Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast and once worked in a cake factory before discovering her taste for poetry. In Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Blackbird, I am moved by her account of labouring in windowless basements as “the dull beat” of a conveyor belt keeps time like a dismal clock. But while money is short, laughter is plenty. My heart leaps as she barrels down a hillside pretending “to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine.” I’m amused when she lets a blackbird poo on her washing, refusing to spoil its song. It is a warm and welcome prelude before her poetry takes a darker turn. Continue reading...

Orlando Reade’s fascinating study of John Milton’s famous work, through the eyes of myriad readers from Malcolm X to white supremacists, shows how it has provoked the widest range of responses and interpretationsIn Dan Brown’s thriller Angels and Demons (2000), the protagonist, Robert Langdon, combs the Vatican archives for proof that the astronomer Galileo Galilei was involved with the sinister secret society known as the Illuminati. He is stunned to discover a manuscript containing four cryptic lines of poetry, not in Latin or Italian, but, his companion tells him, “written in English”. “English?” Langdon gasps, disbelievingly (the breathy italics, just two of hundreds of examples in the novel, are both Brown’s). Not only are the lines in English (English? English!), but their author, despite belonging to a clandestine group, has obligingly put his name to them: “The poem is signed John Milton.” Even as Langdon’s mind boggles, it helpfully spells out the relevant facts: “John Milton? The influential English poet who wrote Paradise Lost?… he was still dazed over the document’s spellbinding implications.” Warning – more italics incoming: “John Milton was an Illuminatus.” While the revelation might not quite be as mind-blowing as those to come in Brown’s next novel, to literary buffs the prospect of Milton the Illuminatus might be almost as sacrilegious as the idea of Christ’s fruitful loins at the end of The Da Vinci Code.It’s arguably too easy – albeit enjoyable – to make fun of Brown’s overblown plotting and prose. What makes this episode worthy of note is that it is just one entertainingly silly instance of Milton’s remarkable tendency to pop up in unexpected places in the centuries since his death, like some kind of poetically visionary, ferociously erudite, fervently anti-monarchical jack-in-the-box. This tendency is the subject of Orlando Reade’s thoughtful, wide-ranging and astute book. In 12 short and elegant chapters, Reade examines a range of contexts in which – and writers for whom – Milton’s great epic poem Paradise Lost has come to matter, both as an object of fascination in its own right, and as a flexible instrument with which to probe and ponder a variety of psychological, social and political predicaments. Each chapter has a chief protagonist, but arrays around them a set of contemporaneous responses to Milton that adds richness and texture to the narrative. Continue reading...

Adolescent passions shape our future selves, and can be every bit as powerful – and perilous – as adult relationshipsI haven’t kept many things from my teenage years. I have a box of photos – hazy snapshots from holidays and parties, captured on disposable cameras and developed at Boots. I have a stack of A-level psychology notes, kept in homage to my subsequent career. And I  have a letter, from a boy called Ben (not his real name), written when we were both 17. We were friends first, and then he was my boyfriend, and then he broke my heart.I took the train to school, and for years Ben and I would walk to and from the station, sometimes bouncing a tennis ball back and forth between us as we spoke. We discovered films together, and music and books, and at the weekends we got drunk with our friends. When half of our year group descended on Newquay for a week after our GCSEs, we lay on the beach together one night, singing at the top of our lungs. More than anything, though, we talked: about life, about who we thought we might be, and what we wanted from the blurry future ahead. Continue reading...

This fascinating history of Nikolai Vavilov and the staff at his plant institute tells a story of almost unbelievable self-sacrifice while under siege during the second world warIs there any human endeavour as heroic or under-appreciated as plant collecting? When in 1921, at the age of 33, Nikolai Vavilov arrived in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) to take charge of the bureau of applied botany and plant breeding, he found a city racked by hunger. War followed by civil conflict had crippled Russia’s food production and distribution systems – a situation compounded by the seizure of peasants’ grain stores by the Bolsheviks – and Petrograd, once the cradle of the Russian empire, had been transformed into a graveyard. Walking along Nevsky Prospekt, Vavilov was appalled to see starving citizens queueing for mouldy bread. “Westward the sun is dropping,” observed the poet Anna Akhmatova, “and already death is chalking the doors with crosses.”On entering the bureau, Vavilov was even more dismayed to find the heating pipes had burst and the storage units containing nearly 14,000 varieties of wheat, barley, oat and rye collected by his predecessor had been eaten by famished staff. It was, recorded a member of Vavilov’s team, “a picture of almost complete destruction”. Continue reading...