6 h. ago Han Kang Nobel prize lecture book sells 10,000 copies in first day online in South Korea

Korean retailers report strong sales for Light and Thread, featuring speeches, essays and poems by novelistA book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel prize lecture sold 10,000 copies in its first day on sale online.Light and Thread, which takes its title from Han’s December lecture, is her first book to be published in South Korea since she was announced as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature last October. Continue reading...

Politics

8 h. ago Children’s and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels

A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and moreGozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99When 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, £12.99Zephaniah’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. Continue reading...

Culture

26 h. ago French PM calls for crackdown on knife crime after fatal high school stabbing

Boy, 15, arrested after at least one child killed and three injured at Notre-Dame-de-Toutes-Aides school in NantesThe French prime minister, François Bayrou, has called for a crackdown on teenage knife crime after a high-school student stabbed four other children at his school, killing at least one and injuring the others before being arrested.The 15-year-old reportedly attacked fellow students with a knife during lunch break on Thursday at the private Notre-Dame-de-Toutes-Aides secondary school in the city of Nantes on the Atlantic coast. The attack took place at around 12.30pm (11.30am BST), before teachers overpowered the boy. One female student was killed. At least one other student is in a critical condition in hospital. Continue reading...

Events

3 d. ago It turns out you’re never too old to go Interrailing around Europe | Phil Mongredien

Having missed out in my youth, I thought that was that – until I took a revelatory trip with my sons. We’re going again this yearYouth might not be wasted on the young, but for the longest time I thought Interrailing was. When I was a student, as the 1980s became the 1990s, many of my friends took the opportunity to discover Europe by train and they all returned with amazing stories of discovery. But for long-forgotten reasons, it was something I was always going to do but never actually got round to. And then suddenly I was in my late 20s and reluctantly resigned myself to never doing it, having been reliably informed by so many people that it was an opportunity only open to those under the age of 26.Fast forward a few decades to spring 2023 and I’m trying to decide where to take my teenage children for our first holiday in five years – a gap caused largely, but not wholly, by the pandemic. My most memorable childhood holiday had come in 1981 when, over the course of a few days, my...

Events

8 d. ago Judge strikes down an Ohio law limiting kids’ use of social media as unconstitutional

A federal judge has permanently struck down an Ohio law that would have required children and teens under 16 to get parental consent to use social media apps

Events

1 week ago Online troll who created Blue Whale suicide 'game' group that encouraged children to kill themselves after completing a series of tasks is jailed for nine years

A sinister online troll who sought to manipulate children and teenagers to commit suicide has been jailed in Russia.

Events

1 week ago ‘We waited greedily for his novels’: Mario Vargas Llosa, a revolutionary of Spanish

His breakthrough book was deemed too inflammatory to be taught in my school, and was burned by authorities, but this Peruvian firebrand would reveal himself to be a man of contradictionsThe early 1960s was, for my generation in Argentina, an age of discovery when, in our mid-teens, we learned about sex, metaphysics, the Beatles, Ezra Pound, Che Guevara, Fellini’s films, and the new literature of Latin America. In the bookstore around the corner from my school, there began to appear novels with black-and-white photographs on the dust jackets whose Spanish-language authors, while acknowledging Borges as the fons et origo of all literary endeavours, attempted to find in the 19th-century European realists new ways to depict the troubled reality of Spain and South America.One of those novels was La Ciudad y los Perros (The City and the Dogs, oddly translated into English as The Time of the Hero) by a young, unknown Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who, in 1962, had won the recently c...

Politics

1 week ago Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’

The Japanese-American author of unsettling new novel Audition talks about why fiction isn’t frivolous, family life with fellow writer Hari Kunzru, and how US authors are facing a critical momentSome years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.”The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college s...

Politics

2 w. ago Thomas Pynchon announces new novel Shadow Ticket, his first in 12 years

Like his previous two novels, Pynchon’s next book is a noir detective story

Politics

2 w. ago Thomas Pynchon announces Shadow Ticket, his first novel in more than a decade

The elusive 87-year-old author’s new book is a noir caper set during the big band era following a detective in search of a cheese heiress Thomas Pynchon has written his first novel in more than a decade, publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has announced.Shadow Ticket, due out in October, will be the American novelist’s 10th book. Like his previous two, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), this new work is a noir novel about a private eye. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing review – nothing about this shocking tale feels OK

This grim documentary shines a light on child social media star Piper Rockelle, the hugely murky ethics surrounding this kind of content – and the high-profile lawsuit that engulfed their careerThe title of the new documentary Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing is interesting. It could be said to presuppose the existence of a good side to allowing, encouraging or coercing young children and early teens to put their lives online for attention and validation (or deliberately creating content to attract subscribers, brand interest and sponsorship deals). But perhaps, you think, I am being hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps this is the way forward. Perhaps it is the way things are these days. Who am I to say how youngsters should connect, spend their time, be raised in 2025?I understand this impulse to ignore the past. I almost admire it. It is good for us all, as we get older, to fight against the creeping belief that the past was better. It is a canard, a conflation of the ha...

Events

2 w. ago ‘Flying is an act of surrender’: a new novel about a woman who wants to be ravished by an Airbus

Kate Folk on Sky Daddy, a book about sex, death and plane crashes that’s taking off in these turbulent timesIf we told our forebears that we could soar in the sky nearly seven miles above the ground, they would stare at us agog. But now air travel is one big grumble: it’s degrading, everyone is ill-mannered and you used to get free peanuts in this country, but now the peanuts are not free. Air travel, like everything else, is about the politics of resentment. The skies are feeling a lot less friendly, and that’s before you get to a year in which Americans have experienced profound tragedy in the air, as well as significant cuts to an already strained Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).In this turbulent time for flying lands Sky Daddy, the unusual debut novel by Kate Folk, a San Francisco author and screenwriter whose short story collection Out There was released in 2022. Sky Daddy is narrated by a woman called Linda who, like many of us, lives her life in dogged pursuit of love. ...

Transport

2 w. ago ‘The law is another form of storytelling’: Philippe Sands in conversation with Juan Gabriel Vásquez

When Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, lawyer Philippe Sands was part of the prosecution. As his book about the case comes out, he talks to the Colombian novelist about literature and justiceWhat do law and literature have in common? Do they represent similar impulses towards understanding human motives and behaviour, or are they fundamentally different systems? In his new book, 38 Londres Street, lawyer and writer Philippe Sands revisits the attempts to extradite and prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, beginning in 1998, in which he was involved. He also finds himself on the trail of Walther Rauff, a former SS officer featured in Sands’s award-winning book East West Street, who went on to seek refuge in Chile, later becoming involved in the Pinochet regime’s arrangements for the detention, torture and murder of its opponents. The Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who trained as a lawyer but decided...

Politics

3 w. ago Our picks of the Classic Crime novels to bring back for April: Murder in Transit, The Mouthless Dead, The Case of the Busy Bees

Barry Turner reviews the best Classic Crime novels out now.

Events

3 w. ago Meryl Streep in talks to play Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie

Oscar-winner set to take on role as godlike lion usually perceived to be male in upcoming adaption of The Magician’s NephewMeryl Streep is in talks to play Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia film, according to reports. According to Nexus Point News, and confirmed by Deadline Streep, 79, is being lined up to star in Netflix’s film, which will be adapted from The Magician’s Nephew – the sixth of CS Lewis Narnia series of novels, but the first in chronological terms.In the Narnia books, Aslan is a dignified and quasi-omniscient lion, generally seen to be male and usually interpreted as an allegory for Jesus. The Magician’s Nephew centres on two children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, who discover the magical world through Digory’s uncle Andrew. Daniel Craig is also in talks for the film, with speculation rising that he will play the uncle. Charli XCX is also in line for a role, rumoured to be Jadis, the White Witch. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Secret emoji language seen in Adolescence every parent should know to keep children safe

Adolescence shone a light on the hidden way many children and teenagers are communicating, with many emojis having darker hidden meanings

Society

3 w. ago How to talk to your children about Adolescence, incels and the manosphere

Here’s what parents should know so they can provide support, writes Annabel Hoare

Politics

3 w. ago ‘Meta has stolen books’: authors to protest in London against AI trained using ‘shadow library’

Writers will gather at the Facebook owner’s King’s Cross office in opposition to its use of the LibGen database to train its AI modelsAuthors and other publishing industry professionals will stage a demonstration outside Meta’s London office today in protest of the organisation’s use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.Novelists Kate Mosse and Tracy Chevalier as well as poet and former Royal Society of Literature chair Daljit Nagra will be among those in attendance outside the company’s King’s Cross office. Continue reading...

Culture

3 w. ago The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits review – a quietly brilliant midlife roadtrip

Once your kids are at university, what’s next for you? This compelling depiction of life at a crossroads is a male counterpart to Miranda July’s All FoursBen Markovits’s quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book’s narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of parenting are about to vanish in the rear view mirror. The question is: what’s next?It’s a moment of change and re-evaluation for any couple. But within Tom and Amy’s marriage an unexploded bomb is ticking. Tom tells us in the first paragraph that, 12 years earlier, Amy had an affair. He managed his heartbreak by making a deal with himself that he would leave when his youngest went to college. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago How to talk to your children about Adolescence and the manosphere

Here’s what parents should know so they can provide support, writes Annabel Hoare

Politics