2 h. ago How did Sarah Jessica Parker become a judge of the Booker Prize?

Plus celebs go skating at Somerset House and Topjaw turns 10

Events

2 h. ago Celebrating literature is good – but I’m running out of patience with celebrity book clubs | Emma Brockes

Sarah Jessica Parker swept all before her at the Booker prize ceremony, but is fame the best way to encourage reading?In these turbulent times, we take small joys where we can find them. And this week we’ll take this: the spectacle of various literary people at the Booker prize award ceremony jamming themselves into photos alongside Sarah Jessica Parker. The actor – if you missed the long piece about it in the New York Times, or the many social media posts promoting Parker’s involvement – served as a judge for the Booker this year, a process that required her to read 153 books, some of them on the New York subway while being followed by a film crew. “Oh let me try!!!!” Parker had posted to Booker organisers last year, and for reasons that became obvious this week, they did.I know what you are going to say; that anything short of full-throated support for Parker’s adorable engagement with books in general and the Booker prize in particular is just unacceptable snobbery. There is noth...

Culture

24 h. ago Sarah Jessica Parker meets Queen Camilla at Clarence House reception for Children's Booker Prize

The Queen was full of compliments for Hollywood legend Sarah Jessica Parker as she welcomed her to Clarence House .

Politics

25 h. ago ‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year’s Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) is often described as “Hungarian-British”, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. “I’m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife...

Politics

33 h. ago One of my favourite books of the year just won the Booker Prize – and it’s 22% off on Amazon

Judge Sarah Jessica Parker described whittling down the list as “real agony”

Politics

45 h. ago David Szalay’s Flesh is the most deserved Booker Prize winner in years

The British-Hungarian author’s triumph caps off what has already been a wonderful year for the UK’s most prestigious award for fiction, writes Martin Chilton

Politics

45 h. ago David Szalay wins Booker prize with ‘extraordinary and singular’ novel Flesh

The British-Hungarian author’s novel exploring modern masculinity was chosen unanimously as this year’s winner, says judging chair Roddy Doyle

Culture

45 h. ago The risky strategy of Booker winner Flesh pays off | Justine Jordan

The protagonist’s inner life is hidden from the reader in this highly original novelDavid Szalay wins 2025 Booker prize for ‘dark’ FleshReflecting on the Booker judging process, chair Roddy Doyle stressed the “singularity” of Flesh, the most unusual novel on the shortlist. In his sixth book, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay takes a classic story arc – one man’s journey through life, from childhood to old age – and presents it in a radically new and challenging way, scooping out the interiority that usually powers the novel form.We meet his protagonist, István, as a bored 15-year-old in a Hungarian backwater. He is seduced by a middle-aged neighbour into a relationship suffused with shame and disgust; a confused act of violence knocks his life off course; he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait; he moves to London and works as a bouncer before the rising tides of global capital carry him, for a while, into the monied elite. And all the while, we are cut off from his tho...

Events

54 h. ago Andrew Miller is bookies’ favourite to win 2025 Booker prize

The Land in Winter has shortest odds of victory, ahead of Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and SunnyAndrew Miller is the bookmakers’ favourite to win the 2025 Booker prize, which will be announced on Monday evening in London.The English author tops the William Hill odds at 6/4 for The Land in Winter, a novel set in 1960s England which follows two marriages struggling under the weight of postwar class divisions, professional dislocation and emotional estrangement. Miller was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2001 for his novel Oxygen. Continue reading...

Politics

60 h. ago Two authors named as favourites to win 2025 Booker Prize for fiction

British novelist Andrew Miller and Indian author Kiran Desai are the favourites to win the award at a ceremony in London on Monday

Culture

62 h. ago Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai are favorites to win the Booker Prize for fiction

British novelist Andrew Miller and Indian author Kiran Desai are the favorites to win the Booker Prize for fiction at a ceremony in London

Politics

4 d. ago ‘I had a year to write it from scratch’: the 2025 Booker finalists on the stories behind their novels

A newspaper report about a missing girl, the memory of a midwinter emergency Susan Choi, Andrew Miller, David Szalay and others on what inspired their shortlisted books The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Continue reading...

Culture

1 week ago From (finally) being given the Booker prize to the day her partner died: an exclusive extract from Margaret Atwood’s new memoir

The novelist reflects on being struck by loss in the middle of a press tour• ‘World power is shifting It is the scariest of times.’ Read an interview with Margaret AtwoodSome years ago, I was asked to make a stunt appearance on a comedy show. The host, Rick Mercer, was doing a series in which people well known for one kind of accomplishment, such as writing, astonished viewers by doing something different and entirely unrelated, such as rolling a joint.“I want you to be a hockey goalie,” Rick said. Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago ‘It is the scariest of times’: Margaret Atwood on defying Trump, banned books – and her score

At 86, she’s a literary seer and saint – and queen of the Canadian resistance. So what does the writer make of our dystopian world?• ‘From (finally) being given the Booker prize to the day her partner died’: an exclusive extract from Margaret Atwood’s memoirMargaret Atwood is doing her grocery shopping in her local supermarket in Toronto, and it is taking longer than usual. This is not because The Handmaid’s Tale author turns 86 this month, but because she is checking the provenance of every item before it goes in her trolley: California satsumas out; Canada spuds in. Atwood is a passionate environmentalist, but at the moment she is more worried about boycotting anything that comes from over the border in the US than air miles. “Elbows up!” she declares, taking a furious stance in the fruit and veg aisle.Back in her kitchen she shows me a YouTube skit of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and comedian Mike Myers in the national hockey kit to explain the significance of “E...

Politics

2 w. ago ‘They disappeared when the wall came down’: German author Jenny Erpenbeck on the objects that contain vast histories

From the drip catchers of coffee pots to the typewriter she used for her first works, the International Booker prize-winning writer reflects on the hidden significance of everyday itemsDrip catcherThe carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced – when the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, when the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.The shop where I used to take my tights to get them mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a little girl – a shop called “Run Express” – disappeared when the Wall came down and the west was able to sell its cheap tights in the east. Continue reading...

Culture

2 w. ago Booker Prize announces launch of first award for children’s fiction

The Children’s Booker Prize winner will be chosen by a combined panel of child and adult judges and awarded £50,000.

Events

2 w. ago The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits audiobook review – an American road trip with a twist

A law professor leaves his failing marriage and faltering career and hits the open road in this Booker-shortlisted novel of midlife turmoilAt the start of The Rest of Our Lives, we learn that Tom, a 55-year-old law professor from New York, plans to leave his wife just as soon as he has dropped their youngest child off at college. Tom and Amy have been together for 30 years. He believes theirs to be a “C-minus marriage” which was irreparably ruptured when Amy had an affair 12 years previously. And so, after leaving their daughter Miriam at college in Pittsburgh, he keeps on driving, revisiting old friends and places in search of his departed youth.Benjamin Markovits’s 12th novel – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize – could be seen as a companion piece to Miranda July’s celebrated All Fours in its exploration of the dissatisfaction of middle age. Tom is not a reliable narrator of his life, though he is nonetheless a compelling protagonist even in his flagrant mome...

Transport

3 w. ago Is Ian McEwan right – has the water bottle trend become ‘deranged’?

As the Booker Prize-winning author claims that the modern obsession with slaking our thirst has gotten out of hand, Helen Coffey looks at why hydration routines are the next big generational divide

Politics

4 w. ago Art of the Game: The Broncos team photographers' favorite photos from a Week 6 win vs. the Jets in London

Art of the Game: The Broncos team photographers' favorite photos from a Week 6 win vs. the Jets in London  Denver Broncos

Culture