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Irish publisher receives award for small presses for Gaëlle Bélem’s There’s a Monster Behind the DoorIrish publisher Bullaun Press has won the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses with the book There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert.There’s a Monster Behind the Door is a “rollicking, sardonic picaresque”, said judge Houman Barekat. “The novel has important things to say about colonialism and society, but it’s also tremendous fun – darkly funny, acerbic, energetic.” 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...

We would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this monthAs part of The Guardian’s “what we’re reading” series, we would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month.Have you read a book in recent weeks – fiction or non-fiction – that you’d recommend? Tell us all about it below. Continue reading...

A classic Yeti romp with 28 possible endings, a Blade Runner-style thriller and more adventures on the Thames with Jessie BurtonBefore video games dangled dopamine hits and a sense of agency, there were Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader could go through the portal – or turn to face the monster. The 1980s-90s franchise still holds much affection, cropping up in a forthcoming Stranger Things homage spin-off, Heroes and Monsters, for one.A new Pushkin Children’s reboot features six pacy titles by one of the most prolific original authors in the series, the late RA Montgomery: romps such as The Abominable Snowman, which has 28 possible endings, and Journey Under the Sea. The hope is to lure children back into their imaginations. Continue reading...

This account of Dr Crippen’s notorious Edwardian-era killing shifts the focus to the women at the centre of the sordid taleOn the evening of 31 January 1910, two couples dined together at a house in Hilldrop Crescent, on the borders of Holloway, London. The hosts, Dr Crippen and his wife, Belle Elmore, had been entertaining their friends, Clara and Paul Martinetti, until the small hours. After some difficulty fetching a cab, the visitors headed home around 1.30am. It was the last time they, or anyone else, would see Elmore alive. When her colleagues at the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild made inquiries about their friend – she was treasurer of the organisation – Crippen told them she had gone off to America to deal with a family crisis. Some weeks later they were informed she had died of double pneumonia in Los Angeles.Thus was sparked an international murder case, one of the most notorious in Britain, later called “the crime of the century”. But Hallie Rubenhold’s engrossing account begins a generation earlier when Hawley Harvey Crippen, a homeopathic doctor, met and married a nurse, Charlotte Bell, in New York. The couple moved west to San Diego, had a son, moved again. In the US of the 1880s, with its burgeoning railroads, you could always change towns, disappear, shed your mistakes along with your creditors, your given name, your dependents. This was the shifty Crippen way, and when Charlotte died of a stroke, aged 33, he was on the move and marrying again. His second wife, a Brooklynite born Kunigunde Mackamotzki, changed her name more than once, eventually settling on Belle Elmore, and after crisscrossing the US the couple emigrated to London, he to peddle his quack remedies for the Drouet Institute, she to pursue a career as an opera singer. Continue reading...

‘I am a crime writer, I understand theft,’ said Val McDermid – joining Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse in their appeal to Lisa Nandy to act on their behalfA group of prominent authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.The letter asked Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to summon Meta senior executives to parliament. 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...

The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdomHalfway through Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s a photograph of John Harris’s son, James, with one of his heroes. James is a young-looking 10 in knee-length shorts decorated with stars. Ian Hunter of 1970s rock band Mott the Hoople stands beside him, a hand gently around his shoulder. “Sixty-nine years separate them,” Harris writes. “Here is proof of how songs and their creators find fans in the most unlikely of places.”Maybe I’m Amazed is the story of a growing child’s love of music, but it’s more than that: it’s also about how songs provided a whole world for James, and his family, after his autism diagnosis. It marks a departure for Harris, whose previous journalism, aside from his political work for the Guardian, has involved editing magazines and writing columns, reviews and other books about music. Continue reading...

Didier Eribon’s guilt and shame fuels an angry and eloquent meditation on our attitudes towards the elderly and the end of life“My mother,” writes Didier Eribon, “was unhappy her whole life.” Abandoned as a child, she started work at 14 as a house servant, later becoming a cleaning lady and then worked for decades making glassware at a factory in France’s Champagne region.Married at 20, she shared a bed for 55 years with a violent, philandering and controlling man she did not love, ultimately bearing intimate witness to his Alzheimer’s disease and death. A decade later, in her mid-80s, her sons put this cognitively and physically enfeebled woman into a state-run nursing home, whose French name – établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – makes it sound nicer than it was. Continue reading...

This timely and important book reveals Barbados plantation owner James Drax to be the equal of Robert Clive or Cecil Rhodes in his profiteering from human miseryIn his enthusiastic introduction to Paul Lashmar’s Drax of Drax Hall, David Olusoga observes that Britain’s role in slavery was, until recently, a “terra incognita”. While a deeper reckoning seemed to have begun in the past few decades – statues toppled, archives scoured, reparations debated – the global rightward lurch has seen a renewed reluctance to connect past crimes with present privilege. Lashmar’s book makes that connection impossible to ignore. Unlike broader studies of Britain’s colonial economy, such as Matthew Parker’s The Sugar Barons or Michael Taylor’s The Interest (to both of which Lashmar acknowledges a great debt), Drax of Drax Hall narrows its focus to a single family, showing that the Drax dynasty did not just profit from slavery but pioneered its brutal processes.James Drax, the family’s 17th-century patriarch, was not merely a plantation owner but the founder of a system of control and punishmen. Arriving in Barbados in 1627, he was instrumental in shifting the island’s labour force from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans. By the 1640s, he had devised the plantation model that would dominate the Caribbean for centuries – a vast industrial machine, extracting staggering wealth through calculated cruelty. At the height of their power, the Draxes enslaved up to 330 people at any one time. The violence was staggering: life expectancy for the enslaved on the island was just five years. Lashmar makes clear that, while figures such as Clive or Rhodes may loom larger in the public imagination, James Drax deserves equal, if not greater, infamy as one of history’s great profiteers of human misery. Continue reading...