What the critics are reading, and what they made of it.
Book of the Day
The Guide
R.K. Narayan · 1958
His first novel was going nowhere in London until a friend at Oxford put it in front of Graham Greene — who found him a publisher and told him to shorten his name.
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The leaves are changing, and so is the footwear. The names on the books are getting bigger. There is, some might say, a crispness. Yes, it’s time for Literary Hub’s annual Ultimate Fall Reading List, in which I read all
Literary Hub · Yesterday
The president’s former press secretary has learned all the right lessons, but how come it took him so long? The most interesting chapter in Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves is the one where the hedge funder turned podcaster goes to work for Donald Trump. It’s summer 2017, and he’s been given the job of comms director, which he doesn’t know how to do, but he and Trump think it’ll work out b…
The Guardian · Yesterday
Twenty years in the writing, this paranormal epic of cold war espionage and family tragedy is a quantum leap in terms of ambition and moral seriousness China Miéville’s epic new novel is presented as being “20 years in the making”. It is quite a testament to how extravagant – even Stakhanovite – his imagination is that during that period he also produced six novels (including The City & the City a…
The Guardian · Yesterday
I've rounded up seven of the best books by intersex authors, from nonfiction about the intersex experience to fiction starring intersex characters.
Book Riot · 2 days ago
A returning British soldier is haunted by his time in Palestine in this panoramic epic set after the second world war Sebastian Faulks’s latest book focuses on the most irreconcilable geopolitical struggle of our age, the Israel-Palestine conflict. While “the sound of mortar and machine gun, the collision of flesh and metal” are integral to Faulks’s best known works, such as Birdsong, in his 17th…
The Guardian · 2 days ago
A sharp analysis of the damage wrought by the reckless super-rich, and progressive toolkit for repairing it The more power the radical rightwing nationalists of our age accrue, the greater the risk that their destructive brand of politics becomes normalised. We should not, for instance, regard it as normal that the man in charge of one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals casually promises “a w…
The Guardian · 2 days ago
The translators bend English to the rhythms of Indian languages in these short story collections
The Hindu · 5 days ago
With a character inspired by Wittgenstein, this exploration of the mysteries of the universe draws on multiple philosophical traditions For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompa…
The Guardian · 5 days ago
A story about diminished aristocrats, doomed lovers and a changing city
The Hindu · 5 days ago
An American Chinese student studies Mandarin in Taiwan, in this heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family secrets What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem of Taiwan, or just another booming global capital…
The Guardian · 6 days ago
Different ways of thinking about writing, stories, and storytelling, plus an unintentional focus on 19th-century England The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: August 2026 appeared first on Reactor .
Reactor · 6 days ago
The author explores themes of legacy, mortality and loneliness in the first work of fiction since his near-fatal attack Five short stories and five readers make up Salman Rushdie’s collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction since the near-fatal attack in 2022 where he sustained life-changing injuries. These tales find the author exploring legacy, mortality, loneliness and the ageing…
The Guardian · 6 days ago
Saadia Azim’s book explores how misinformation travels from WhatsApp groups and social media into public life, fuelling vigilantism and violence
The Hindu · 6 days ago
D.D. Kosambi, the formidable polymath and polyglot, finds an ideal biographer who is equally at home with mathematics and history
The Hindu · 6 days ago
Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage…
The Guardian · 7 days ago
A refreshingly optimistic book that asks us to grasp the educational opportunities of AI, rather than shrink from them In 1979, the government asked Wilfred Cockcroft, a now largely forgotten maths lecturer from the University of Hull, to write a report about a crisis in the teaching of his subject to children. It was wide-ranging and meticulous, and included a chapter on a technological innovatio…
The Guardian · 7 days ago
Book Riot's series on the Best Books of the Century (So Far) continues with our picks for the best children's books of the 21st century.
Book Riot · 8 days ago
A journalist embarks on a wild goose chase that might – or might not – be informative about the male condition Recovering from surgery at home in upstate New York in 2023, Jon Ronson awoke to a string of texts from his adult son about a weird evening he just had at a stranger’s castle in Connecticut. Having gone along with a friend who’d been invited to a party there, he arrived to find a few lost…
The Guardian · 8 days ago
The third in a loose American trilogy follows the epic journey of a formerly enslaved man in the aftermath of the civil war But is not the story as good as the truth?” asks Tennyson Bouguereau, the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World. Tennyson, a formerly enslaved man in post-civil war America, recounts his life story in ways that call to mind the age-old debate about whether it’s better…
The Guardian · 8 days ago
There are glimpses of Atkinson’s subtle brilliance in this gentle noirish mystery set around the Festival of Britain In 1951, in a desperate attempt to raise the spirits of a shattered nation, the government came up with the Festival of Britain, a celebration of national creativity, grit and ingenuity. It is a moment in history that could have been designed for Kate Atkinson, who loves nothing mor…
The Guardian · 9 days ago
A biography of the physicist recognises his achievements, but also reveals the selfish narcissist underneath When I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking’s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was “too early” to voice anything other than praise for the physicist who died, aged 76, that March.…
The Guardian · 9 days ago
The stream-of-consciousness writing takes the reader on a journey through a shared British South Asian male experience
The Hindu · 11 days ago
The women in the novel stand out with their stories of courage and resilience
The Hindu · 11 days ago
Author Duncan Hamilton swaps the devotee’s lens for the chronicler’s in his book
The Hindu · 12 days ago
Fetch by Colin Bramwell; Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney; The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber by Jay Gao; Belling the Leopard by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley; The Matter by Padraig Regan Fetch by Colin Bramwell ( And Other Stories, £14.99 ) Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenf…
The Guardian · 12 days ago
In Land, O’Farrell unveils a family saga that goes beyond generational trauma and colonialism
The Hindu · 12 days ago
Imbued with a gentle sadness, these verses evoke the suffering of the world
The Hindu · 12 days ago
Why are legal reads necessary, and who has the last word? The controversy surrounding the Congress leader’s memoir throws these questions into sharp relief
The Hindu · 12 days ago
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s niece has picked up the thread of her much-loved family saga series, taking the story into the 1960s Elizabeth Jane Howard’s beloved family saga the Cazalet Chronicles spans three decades in the life of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family. The first four books, written in the 1990s, run from a bucolic prewar 1937 to a bruising 1947, while the fifth, 2013’s All Change , sk…
The Guardian · 12 days ago
The author writes with the flair of a journalist and maintains the rigour of an academic scholar
The Hindu · 13 days ago