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I won’t be showing off the results of the novel I wrote in a month, but the nonprofit’s community-backed challenge is worthwhile and should continueIt seems budding writers can make alternative plans for this coming November. Maybe take a holiday, learn to juggle, work on their chess openings … or anything, anything, that doesn’t involve writing an entire novel in a month.I am, of course, referring to the sad news that the online writing community NaNoWriMo is calling it a day after more than 20 years in existence. The organisation, which has existed officially as a nonprofit since 2006, has been a source of inspiration to many amateur (and professional) writers who’ve needed the requisite kick up the bum to actually get stuff down on the page. Because although NaNoWriMo – short for National Novel Writing Month – existed all year round as a support group for writers, it was known chiefly for its November writing marathon – could you write 50,000 words in that month alone? Or, to put it another way, could you average 1,667 words a day over a 30-day period? Or, to put it another way, were you willing to go stark-raving crackers for a month? Continue reading...

The poet and writer returns to the May Day mountains in a gentle rumination on family and natureGo these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. Some volumes are philosophical, others urgent calls for climate justice. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia.The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant’s early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by “grung” – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. And memories of feeling connected – to the ground, to the past, to kinfolk. “In ‘soil’,” Jennifer Kabat has written, “I hear other words: soul and social.” Continue reading...

A runaway orphan from coastal Kent is the protagonist in this tightly plotted reimagining of Herman Melville’s whaling classic“‘And now here I was, an accidental whaler, who knew nothing of whales, except the festive spout in the distance and the unreal immensity of a sperm whale’s corpse on a windy shore.”So thinks the heroine of Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle, from the deck of the whaler Nimrod, where she has enlisted as a sailor. A teenage orphan from coastal Kent, where she grew up swimming with seals and dolphins, she’s escaped a half-starved life as a factory worker by dressing as a boy to go to sea. Now she finds herself in a crew captained by a morose, reclusive, peg-legged man, who is monomaniacally obsessed with finding and killing the great white whale which maimed him. As many readers will already have guessed, the unlucky Ishmaelle has landed herself in a retelling of Moby-Dick. Continue reading...

A psychotherapist explores the nature of infidelity through a series of case studiesAffairs are hot stuff. The antics of cheating partners have been hooking audiences from the earliest days of storytelling to modern romcoms and hit podcasts by relationship experts.It is only natural, then, that a psychotherapist turned author specialising in long-term relationships would want in on the action. “Why do we have affairs?” asks Juliet Rosenfeld in the introduction to her second book, which promises to look at infidelity – something that one in five of us will be affected by – “in a way that we usually don’t”. Her first book, The State of Disbelief, explored her experience of mourning after the death of her husband, Andrew. Continue reading...

Writers will gather at the Facebook owner’s King’s Cross office in opposition to its use of the LibGen database to train its AI modelsAuthors and other publishing industry professionals will stage a demonstration outside Meta’s London office today in protest of the organisation’s use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.Novelists Kate Mosse and Tracy Chevalier as well as poet and former Royal Society of Literature chair Daljit Nagra will be among those in attendance outside the company’s King’s Cross office. Continue reading...

Once your kids are at university, what’s next for you? This compelling depiction of life at a crossroads is a male counterpart to Miranda July’s All FoursBen Markovits’s quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book’s narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of parenting are about to vanish in the rear view mirror. The question is: what’s next?It’s a moment of change and re-evaluation for any couple. But within Tom and Amy’s marriage an unexploded bomb is ticking. Tom tells us in the first paragraph that, 12 years earlier, Amy had an affair. He managed his heartbreak by making a deal with himself that he would leave when his youngest went to college. Continue reading...

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from an engrossing study of Chinese women to a fun, loveable novel Continue reading...

Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsWhen HHhH by Laurent Binet came out in 2012, I was scared away by the impenetrable title. I still don’t like the title much because it gives no sense that this book is going to be so welcoming, playful and immersive. HHhH tells the true story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich – the high-ranking Nazi officer, “the butcher of Prague” – but it also describes Binet’s research on the subject, an obsession which verges on mania. The book makes a convincing case that Heydrich’s botched assassination was the single most significant event of the 20th century. (It also makes a convincing case that Binet is so deep into the subject matter that his opinion should not be entirely trusted.)Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst has just won the Nero book of the year prize so it really does not need my recommendation. Nevertheless, I recommend it! It jolts you awake from the very first page, telling a true and uniquely weird love story about a British couple whose boat is sunk by whale-strike while they are sailing around the world. Elmhirst finds moments of transcendence even as Maurice and Maralyn are beginning to starve and decompose, physically and mentally, while adrift in a leaky dinghy in the middle of the Pacific.The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod is my favourite poetry anthology. The poems are presented in reverse chronological order so that the book starts with recent work from Anne Carson and Patricia Lockwood then steadily dives backwards through time: Eileen Myles to Allen Ginsberg to Gertrude Stein before finally ending in 1842 with Aloysius Bertrand writing beautiful prose poems before the term even existed. Every time I come back to this book I find new gems. Continue reading...

Critics say bans would hinder rights as proponents would impose their beliefs on others who don’t share their viewsRightwing groups around the US are pushing legislation that would place new limits on what books are allowed in school libraries in a move that critics decry as censorship often focused on LGBTQ+ issues or race or imposing conservative social values.Caught up in the attempts at suppressing books are classics like The Color Purple and Slaughterhouse Five. Continue reading...

‘Follow your instincts’ has become a modern mantra. But what if they lead you astray? ‘What should I do?” Whether openly stated or implicit, this is the question a new client usually raises in their first therapy session. People come to see me for many reasons: relationship problems, addiction and mental health difficulties, such as anxiety. Increasingly, I have found that beneath all of these disparate problems lies a common theme: indecision, the sense of feeling stuck, and lack of clarity as to the way forward.Making decisions is difficult. Anyone who has lain awake contemplating a romantic dilemma, or a sudden financial crisis, knows how hard it can be to choose a course of action. This is understandable, given that in any scenario we must contend with a myriad conflicting thoughts and emotions – painful recollections from the past, hopes for the future, and the expectations of family, friends, and co-workers. Continue reading...

Two enjoyable debut novels put fresh meat on Fitzgerald’s deathless classic – one a modern-day retelling in which Gatsby becomes a female influencer, another a pacy murder mystery in the vein of Agatha ChristieIt might seem unfathomable to us now, but F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel was something of a let-down when it was published 100 years ago; his previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned – there had also been a novella, The Diamond As Big As the Ritz, and short stories including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – had been more commercially successful and found greater favour with critics. Fitzgerald’s tale of obscure origins, extreme wealth and obsessional romantic desire appeared too unlikely, too contrived and, perhaps, too uncomfortable a reminder of class and financial inequality and its consequent social schisms to be recognised for what it was: a masterly exploration of delusion, self-delusion, myth-making and complicity.Fitzgerald himself died 15 years after its publication believing it to have been a worldly failure and unconsoled by any hint of its future cultural ubiquity. But literature, as we know, is studded with these anomalies, burials and rebirths and now, in an age of recycling and rebooting, it seems perfectly natural, if ironic, for The Great Gatsby to spawn a number of tribute acts. Continue reading...

In the final part of a bravura trilogy detailing the struggle to bring war criminals to account, Sands tracks a former SS commander to Chile, where he found a friend in Augusto PinochetThis is the concluding part of Philippe Sands’s extraordinary trilogy – part history, part moral investigation, part memoir – that documents the legal and personal battles to bring to account Nazi war criminals and their disciples.In East West Street he recounted the plight of Lviv, the city now in Ukraine, whose Jewish population either fled before Nazi occupation or, like many of Sands’s extended family, was thereafter wiped out. Two Jewish lawyers who got out early were instrumental in creating the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide that were introduced at the Nuremberg trials. Continue reading...