To soundtrack those long, lazy afternoons try Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s torrid love affair, a real-life pirate of the Caribbean or Peter Dinklage as Hercule Poirot
• UK audiobook revenue up by almost a third last year

A gloriously gossipy portrait of Hollywood power couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Roger Lewis’s twin biography is read with just the right amount of archness by actor Justin Avoth. The “erotic vagrancy� of the title refers to a statement issued by the pope during the pair’s brazen antics in Rome while filming Cleopatra when they frolicked on a yacht in full view of the paparazzi. Both were married, but not to each other.
• Available via Riverrun, 22hr 58min

Income from audiobooks reached a record £268m in 2024, according to figures from the Publishers Association
• The 10 best audiobooks for summer

Whether it’s plugging in to Benedict Cumberbatch reading Austen while doing the washing up or listening to Meryl Streep narrate Nora Ephron’s Heartburn on the way to work, the UK is increasingly getting into audiobooks.

Audiobook revenue generated by UK publishers rose by 31% between 2023 and 2024, with income from audiobooks reaching a record £268m last year, according to the Publishers Association (PA), the body representing UK publishers.

A young gay Black man escapes from grief into the hedonism of upper-echelon New York, in a lyrical tale of redemption

Lives can turn on one mistake. Smith’s comes when he is caught in the corner of a restaurant in the Hamptons on the last night of summer, snorting cocaine from a key. He walks calmly out with the two khaki-clad police officers, poses for a mugshot and posts his $500 bail.

Smith is Black, which won’t help, but he comes from wealth, which will. So he calls his sister, who calls his father in Atlanta, who tells his mother, who collapses on the floor in shock then starts calling lawyers. Smith prepares for his court date with a series of AA meetings and counselling sessions that will make it clear that this promising young man is on the road to redemption.

From buzzards in Oxfordshire to cranes in Kent – how once common birds left their mark in British place names

Old place names recall old ways of belonging. They often reference characteristics of the land or its use, the people who lived there, or the non-human lives they were enmeshed with. A great many of these vivifying genii loci are birds, although their identities aren’t always obvious because language evolves over time. We need a guide.

Enter Michael Warren: teacher of English, amateur ornithologist and a man who lives in a Britain different to the one most of us inhabit: a medieval one, which by some magic has “survived in another dimension parallel to our own�. The gift he bestows in this gorgeous book is that, by the end, we live there too, newly able to read the growth rings of place, and to perceive an alternative land shimmering over the one we already know.

Six ‘inspiring new voices’ made the list, which features a Saltburn-style summer holiday and a Swedish bestseller

Waterstones has selected six “astonishingly impressive and inspiring new voices� for its fourth debut fiction prize shortlist, including Catherine Airey, William Rayfet Hunter and Lucy Steeds.

The shortlist, which also features Gurnaik Johal, Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin and Lisa Ridzén, represents a “bright and promising future for fiction�, said Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones.

An ambitious meditation on the ability of narrative to shape our perceptions of one another and our experience of home

Marina Warner begins this dazzlingly protean book with a distinctly mundane memory. It is the 1950s, she is a young teen, and the highlight of her week is going to the Saturday morning “flicks� with a neighbour’s slightly older daughter. One particular movie scene has stayed with her: it involves a man dressed in a vaguely historical costume who is fleeing for his life. Face contorted with terror, he makes it as far as the door of a cathedral, whereupon he knocks loudly and cries “Sanctuary!� The door opens a crack, the man slides inside, and the Saturday morning audience breaths a collective sigh of relief. Even if the plot points remain hazy – is Robin Hood somehow involved? – the underlying principle needs no explaining. The fugitive has invoked the ancient right by gaining entrance to a designated sacred space. As long as he stays put his pursuers can’t touch him.

From these hyper-local beginnings, Warner sets out to explore and expand what “sanctuary� means in an age when millions are on the move around the world, chased out of their homes by environmental disaster, economic collapse, war and political oppression.

In this page-turning romance, teenage sweethearts reunite as thirtysomething women

Sex is notoriously difficult to write. Some authors avoid it entirely; even those who have been called great can come a cropper. Which is why I want to start this review by saying that the sex scenes in Ordinary Love are some of the best I have read this year, and that Marie Rutkoski has a facility for writing physical intimacy that can elude even some of our most gifted authors. Her voice has been compared to that of Sally Rooney. I don’t see much of that in this novel beyond a Rooneyesque ability to write sex well, but that is a talent worth noting.

Ordinary Love is a queer romance that tells the story of Emily and Gen, teenage sweethearts who break up in college and reunite in their 30s, their paths having diverged dramatically. Emily marries Jack, who is wealthy and emotionally abusive. When she sees Gen again, she is in the process of leaving him for the second time (the novel opens with a scene vividly depicting the dealbreaker: it is violence against a child that finally does it). Gen, meanwhile, has become an Olympic athlete and serial womaniser. Both are carrying the wounds of their adolescent relationship, which is recounted in flashback, and the homophobia they faced, particularly from Emily’s father. In one particularly moving scene, Gen’s grandmother – who raised her after her mother died from opioid addiction – counters his bigotry by making a toast: “To my granddaughter. I love you. I love everything about you. I am so proud.�

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from moving memoirs to sequels of beloved novels

Ahead of the author’s much anticipated memoir, we count down the best of her books – from climate dystopias to her world-conquering handmaids

After more than 30 years, Atwood caved to pleas to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not since Harry Potter had a publication caused such a sensation: computers were hacked in search of the manuscript and advance copies were kept under lock and key. With classic Atwood timing, the novel coincided with the phenomenal success of the TV adaptation of the original – not to mention the arrival of Trump at the White House. The Testaments won Atwood her second Booker prize, shared (controversially) with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction

• Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85
• Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’

Edmund White, who has died aged 85, was born in Cincinnati, to conservative, homophobic parents. Although he soon rejected almost all his family’s cultural values, he retained their work ethic: White published 36 books in his lifetime, and was working on a tale of queer life in Versailles when he died.

Starting out his career in New York, during the magical and radical years that fell between gay liberation and Aids, he then worked hard and long enough to be eventually acclaimed as the “elder stateman� of American queer literary fiction. White’s most characteristic trick as a writer was to pair his impeccably “high� style with the raunchiest possible subject-matter. When talking about gay men’s sex-lives, the goods have rarely been delivered so elegantly. Author and director Neil Bartlett suggests some good places to start.

An immensely readable dive into the ‘predictive processing’ hypothesis, our best guess as to how the mind really works

The process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don’t notice. Our brains are always “filling in� our perceptual experience, supplementing incoming information with existing knowledge. For example, each of us has a spot at the back of our eye where there are no light receptors. We don’t see the resulting hole in our field of vision because our brains ignore it. The phenomenon we call “seeing� is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counter­intuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: “perception is a controlled hallucination�.

A century ago, someone with an interest in psychology might have turned to the work of Freud for an overarching vision of how the mind works. To the extent there is a psychological theory even remotely as significant today, it is the “predictive processing� hypothesis. The brain is a prediction machine and our perceptual experiences consist of our prior experiences as well as new data. Daniel Yon’s A Trick of the Mind is just the latest popularisation of these ideas, but he makes an excellent guide, both as a scientist working at the leading edge of this field and as a writer of great clarity. Your brain is a “skull bound scientist�, he proposes, forming hypotheses about the world and collecting data to test them.

From gay penguin parents to snake orgies, a biology professor looks at sexual adaptation in the animal world

In 1998, Roy and Silo, a pair of male chinstrap penguins at Central Park Zoo in New York, were given an abandoned egg to incubate after zookeepers observed them performing mating rituals together. For 34 days, they took turns sitting on it. When the egg hatched, the story became a viral sensation. The New York Times celebrated “A Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name�. Roy, Silo and their daughter Tango became the subject of a LGBTQ-friendly children’s book, And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell.

Biology professor Nathan Lents remembers receiving copies of Tango as a gift when he and his husband became foster parents. Fast-forward to the present day, and Tango tops Pen America’s list of the most frequently banned picture books in the US. It was part of a high-profile lawsuit in Nassau County, Florida, and was designated for pulping by officials in Singapore. In 2025, it’s apparent that “conventional categories for gender identity and expression, and sexual attraction and romanticism, are just not cutting it any more�, Lents writes. Queer, non-binary, transgender, polyamorous – terms that were perhaps once obscure are here to stay. But at the same time, a powerful backlash is under way.

She was Michael Gove’s wife and Samantha Cameron’s best friend. But then Brexit happened

Politics is awful.

If you want the digested read of Sarah Vine’s memoir on life as a Westminster WAG, that’s it: politics, she writes, is a hateful business that ruined her marriage to Michael Gove, her health and happiness. (Don’t ask what the Cameron years did to anyone else: this book is absolutely not about anyone else.) But like many a passionate hatred, this one started out as love.

A philosopher challenges us to forget about ourselves in this powerfully strange counterblast to identity fetishism

Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we “identify as�. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.

The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as “identity politics� (now subsumed under the general concept of “wokeness�), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don’t have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them.

Awakened by Laura Elliott; Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab; Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang; Esperance by Adam Oyebanji; The Quiet by Barnaby Martin

Awakened by Laura Elliott (Angry Robot, £9.99)
A debut novel set in an apocalyptic 2055, following the development of a neural chip dispensing with the need for sleep. At first it seemed a blessing: it ramped up people’s metabolisms, made them stronger and more productive workers, but when they ignored the advice to turn it off and sleep for at least a few hours a week, they turned into ravenous monsters. Thea is one of a group of scientists who developed the chip and are now barricaded in the Tower of London, struggling to reverse the damage they have caused, when two survivors turn up seeking shelter: a silent, traumatised woman and her protector, a nameless man who shows signs of having once been Sleepless himself. Thea comes to question her own values and past actions in a dark and gripping gothic tale with echoes of Frankenstein and The Yellow Wallpaper.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab (Tor, £22)
The latest by the author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue spans centuries, and is focused on three women: Maria, born in 16th-century Spain; Charlotte, in Victorian England; and 21st-century Alice, who grew up in Scotland and is struggling to adapt to life as a university student in the US. All are sexually drawn to women and are isolated from their families. Other, darker connections are revealed as their separate stories become more closely interwoven. A fresh and addictively readable take on a much-loved horror/fantasy trope.

Life is turned upside-down by a new arrival, in this weird and charming tale of nature and family – with a guest appearance from the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson

Often thought of as the northernmost point of the British Isles, the Scottish island Muckle Flugga lies on the outer reaches of the Shetland archipelago. Norse legend has it that this craggy and almost uninhabitable place was created by two warring giants, obsessed with the same mermaid. While throwing boulders at each other, one of the rivalrous giants’ missiles accidentally plopped into the sea: and so the island was born.

A version of this mythic tussle is central to Michael Pedersen’s debut novel. When the narrative opens, delivered in a lively present tense sprinkled with Scots, The Father and his 19-year-old son Ouse are the only residents on the island. The Father mans Muckle’s lighthouse, and is as volatile as the waves he illuminates. A gossip from a neighbouring island describes him as irascible, with “a viper in his throat and … a broken soldier’s thirst for whisky�. Ouse, meanwhile, is “a queer sort� “who sounds as if he’s been sooking helium out of party balloons … always staring off into the distance�. He’s famed in the area for being an “artiste�, a dab hand at needlework with a reputation for producing beautiful handmade textiles.

Stories within stories give fascinating depth to the prize-winning author’s third novel, about a woman’s return to her family home in the west of Ireland

Elaine Feeney’s third novel, following the success of her prize-winning debut As You Were and the Booker-longlisted How to Build a Boat, focuses on Claire O’Connor, a woman who has moved from London back to Athenry in the west of Ireland in the wake of her mother’s death. Her new life is disturbed when she finds her ex-partner Tom has moved in down the road. Or rather, that’s one thread in a story that becomes steadily more interesting than this simple set-up from the romance novelist’s playbook, as layers of family memory and trauma build up to form a portrait of the wider O’Connor family: all their history, the way it has shaped them and the traces it has left on the places around.

Claire shows herself to be unusually attuned to the history of her home place, telling stories about nearby Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats lived; Lady Gregory’s Coole Park; the place where Cromwell used to stable his horses. At first it seems a bit forced, a writer shoehorning in their research. But the tic begins to make sense as the marks of the past on Claire’s family are revealed; slowly, one realises that the enumeration of these histories is crucial to the way the O’Connors live. Central to this gradual discovery is Feeney’s use of stories-within-the-story; the novel is enlivened by a series of smaller, contained memories from Claire’s childhood, and tales reaching back a century to the time when the O’Connors first lived in the family home.

Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novel

Claire Adam’s 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.

Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it’s also set partly in south London – the writer’s own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart.

A girl with super strength; anarchic doughnuts on a mission to rule the world; boys in the Blitz; an Igbo YA fantasy and more

The Bear-Shaped Hole by John Dougherty, illustrated by Thomas Docherty, Frances Lincoln, £7.99
This sensitive, gentle, straightforward story of friends who must part will help small readers weather the painful emotions that come before a loved one dies.

Wild by Katya Balen, illustrated by Gill Smith, Walker, £12.99
A little girl who loves the woods’ wildness is bereft when she moves to the city. When the rolling, twisting river shows her “the secrets hidden under its tongue�, she realises her wildness never left her. A lush, poetic picture book, with words by a Carnegie-winning author.

A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and more

Gozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99
When a bear finds a goose egg, rather than breakfast, it hatches sweet, tenacious Gozzle, who’s convinced goslings can do everything bears do. But what will happen when she learns to fly? A comically adorable picture book about family, growth and change.

Leave the Trees, Please by Benjamin Zephaniah, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon, Magic Cat, £12.99
Zephaniah’s posthumously published picture book, featuring a dynamic repeated refrain and soaring, swirling illustrations, calls on young listeners to safeguard trees and the riches of the natural world.

A classic Yeti romp with 28 possible endings, a Blade Runner-style thriller and more adventures on the Thames with Jessie Burton

Before 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.

Sleepy monsters; a wacky broken robot; a search for magical treasures and more

Hello Bunny! by Sharon King-Chai, Two Hoots, £8.99
An entrancingly bold, shiny board book, full of bright creatures, joyous greetings, and a baby-pleasing mirror at the end.

Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob by Huw Aaron, Puffin, £7.99
Featuring a catalogue of sleepy monsters from cyborg to yeti, winding down alongside the cute little blob of the title, this rhyming bedtime picture book is a witty, tender mix of the adorable and the appalling.

One year on, Jonathan Haidt talks about the way his book changed the global conversation around children and digital devices – and explains how he handles his own teenagers

Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. You’ll have to forgive the cliche, because it’s literally true. The author of The Anxious Generation, an urgent warning about the effect of digital tech on young minds, is based at New York University’s business school: “I’m around all these corporate types and we’re always talking about companies and their mission statements,� he tells me. So, he decided to make one for himself. “It was very simple: ‘My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others to help people better understand each other, and to help important social institutions work well.’�

This is characteristic of Haidt: there’s the risk that writing your own brand manifesto might seem a bit, well, pompous. What comes across instead is the nerd’s desire to be as effective as possible, combined with the positive psychologist’s love of self-improvement (one of his signature undergraduate courses is called Flourishing, which sets students homework such as “catch and analyse 10 automatic thoughts�).

The Girl, Woman, Other author has this week been awarded a one-off Women’s prize award for her outstanding contribution. She talks about her long road to recognition, and using her profile to support other writers

Back in 2013, Bernardine Evaristo gave a reading in a south London bookshop from her novel Mr Loverman. Only six people showed up, a couple of them were dozing and she realised they were homeless people who had come to find somewhere comfortable to sleep. Last month, the hit TV adaptation Mr Loverman, about a 74-year-old gay Caribbean man set in Hackney, east London, won two Baftas, including leading actor for Lennie James, making him the first Black British actor to win the TV award in its 70-year history. “I checked Wikipedia!� Evaristo exclaims of this shocking fact when we meet in London.

Evaristo’s long career is one of firsts and creating them for others. In 2019, at the age of 60, she became the first Black woman to win the Booker prize – shared with Margaret Atwood – for Girl, Woman, Other, 12 interwoven stories of Black, female and one non-binary character. She is also the first Black woman to become president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) – only the second woman in its 200-year history, not to mention the first not to have attended Oxford, Cambridge or Eton. And this week she became the recipient of the Women’s prize inaugural Outstanding Contribution award.

The novelist has been awarded the Dylan Thomas prize for young writers. She talks about giving up medical training to pursue fiction – and the childhood memories that inspired her winning debut, The Coin

Buying a Birkin bag is not easy. You can’t just waltz into an Hermès store and pluck one off the shelf, even if you’re prepared to drop the many thousands required to pay for it. “The great majority of people are refused a Birkin, they get told that there aren’t any available in the store, which is a lie, they just don’t want to give it to them,� explains the protagonist of Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin, which this month won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for authors aged 39 or under.

Zaher’s unnamed narrator, a Palestinian woman living in New York, has to get to grips with Hermès’s exclusive and elusive sales policies – which seem to privilege loyal customers – after being drawn into a Birkin reselling operation.

The author on Marxist revelations, returning to Don DeLillo and reading all of Elizabeth Taylor

My earliest reading memory
Beatrix Potter when I was having my tonsils out. No point saying how much I loved her books because everyone does, but Roberto Calasso makes a brilliant point in The Celestial Hunter by pairing “two great moments in the Victorian age� when Darwin “linked human beings to primates� and Potter “distributed human behaviour among a certain number of small domestic and rural animals�.

My favourite book growing up
The Guns of Navarone. My first Alistair MacLean, the first of about 20 before I grew out of him at the age of 15. They were thrilling and addictive and it was possible, while reading, to visualise every scene so clearly (helped in part by the scene-enacting photos on the covers of the Fontana editions).

Smartphones offer instant stimulation, but do they silence a deeper message?

In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it. One man pressed the button 190 times – even though he, like everyone else in the study, had earlier indicated that he found the shock unpleasant enough that he would pay to avoid being shocked again. The study’s authors concluded that “people prefer doing to thinking�, even if the only thing available to do is painful – perhaps because, if left to their own devices, our minds tend to wander in unwanted directions.

Since the mass adoption of smartphones, most people have been walking around with the psychological equivalent of a shock button in their pocket: a device that can neutralise boredom in an instant, even if it’s not all that good for us. We often reach for our phones for something to do during moments of quiet or solitude, or to distract us late at night when anxious thoughts creep in. This isn’t always a bad thing – too much rumination is unhealthy – but it’s worth reflecting on the fact that avoiding unwanted mind-wandering is easier than it’s ever been, and that most people distract themselves in very similar, screen-based ways.

The civil war transforms a young trainee doctor’s life as she copes with her feelings for a Tamil Tiger in last year’s Women’s prizewinning novel

Brotherless Night opens with 16-year-old Sashi Kulenthiren, who hopes to be a doctor like her eldest brother, making tea when the kettle slips out of her hand, causing her to pour boiling water on herself. When a neighbour, K, hears her screams, he rushes over to help, cracking raw eggs over the scalds to soothe the pain. “So I began as K’s patient though he ended as mine,� Sashi reflects.

Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, VV Ganeshananthan’s coming-of-age novel – which won the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction – is an epic and hard-hitting tale of family and survival as it documents life during the civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority that lasted three decades. Before fighting breaks out, Sashi’s most pressing problem is whether she will pass her exams at school. But soon violence and kidnapping become the norm, communities are left “brotherless� and ordinary citizens are turned into what the outside world calls terrorists.

Gifts sent from a loved one abroad at first bring warmth and joy, then grave alarm

This Year Her Present

wasn’t a book —
my shelves sag under the weight of volumes
she’s given me over the last two decades
since I moved from Ukraine to Ireland;