Books
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This year’s shortlist also includes Jesus on Gardening, Equine Dry Needling and Why Sell Tacos in Africa? -
The firebrand QC makes an incisive and sobering case that the legal system still discriminates against women
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The Leeds-born writer remembers the series of accidents that allowed him to tell a story about fatherhood that’s both funny and emotionally exposed -
Who is stealing souls in Whitechapel? O’Donnell brings Victorian London gloriously to life in an unorthodox confection of thrills and chills
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Last but one in hit series aimed at adults follows works about sheds and mid-life crises
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Daniels’s book reveals her to be a defiant survivor, with an eye for scabrous detail -
A celebration of women who helped shape modern Britain is as entertaining as it is enlightening -
Colm Tóibín’s examination of three writers’ relationships with their fathers is full of insight and intrigue
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There’s sharp social comedy to be found in JK Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike book – if you can navigate a complex murder mystery -
Gambling, hunting, philosophy and romance … life lessons from fathers to their sons make for a funny, quirky debut -
A predatory Athena and a playboy Narcissus bring flashes of brilliance to a reworking of Ovid that lacks rigour
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In this long-winded exploration of a marriage, the bestselling Spanish author is fascinated by uncertainty and self-deception -
Paintings become magic portals in this digressive, beguiling novel about an artist in flight from himself -
A tech pioneer loses control of her creation in this striking, intoxicating book
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Sibling love drives this richly imagined adventure from the author of The Girl of Ink and Stars -
Moby-Dick is reimagined from the whale’s point of view in this lyrical, pacey tale -
Tracy Beaker is back, as a single mum living on a council estate. The bestselling author talks about ‘grit-fic’, selfie-culture – and what she won’t write about
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The books interview: his surreal stories are read by millions but the Japanese novelist is bemused by his celebrity. The eternal Nobel favourite reveals why his books appeal in times of chaos -
The author of The Poisonwood Bible is back with an ambitious novel charting the US in breakdown. She talks about the environment, victim-blaming – and being a hillbilly -
Her tales of female knights have made her a favourite for girl readers since the 80s. She talks about bringing ‘the rawness of reality’ to her fiction
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The Team of Rivals author has brought Lincoln together with Johnson and two Roosevelts to produce a timely study of what makes a great president -
The Colombian writer on the legacy of his country’s civil war and how literature can help us come to terms with the past -
In her extraordinary graphic memoir Heimat, Krug dissects antisemitism in her own family’s history and Germany’s national guilt over the Holocaust – and the country’s recent far-right backlash
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The Lonely Londoners’ carefully ordinary observations are true to their period, but the frustrations his characters undergo are sadly not historical -
This ghostly Icelandic parable of patriarchy subtly defies predictable sexual politics -
What to read
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The prizewinning poet on the pleasures of Andrea Lawlor, Willie Perdomo and the ‘best novel ever written’ -
Following the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Ian Black picks five books that get inside the secretive kingdom -
Autumn books 2018
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From Haruki Murakami to Michelle Obama, what to read this season
You may have missed
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Secret interrogations, elaborately staged deceptions, conspiracies and murder ... John le Carré’s murky spy thriller could not be more relevant -
Funny, literary and irreverent, How to Eat reinvented the cookbook. Twenty years on, Bee Wilson explores how Nigella Lawson’s evocative, appetite-driven food writing influenced a generation -
A poet who samples hip-hop and household appliances, a Hansel and Gretel for the #MeToo era ... the avant garde is more diverse and engaged than ever -
Rows, gaffes and disdainful speeches have always kept the Booker prize in the news. But now, a creeping sense of bad decision-making is undermining its cachet
Book of the day Murder by The Book by Claire Harman – scandalous Victorian mystery