3 d. ago ‘We need to reclaim these words’: Inside England’s first romance

Saucy Books in London has become the go-to destination for romance readers – but fans say misogyny is stopping the genre getting the recognition it deservesWhether you want a brooding billionaire, a queer awakening, a dragon rider (yes, really) or an old-fashioned enemies-to-lovers tale, there’s a romance novel for everybody at Saucy Books.England’s first romance-only bookshop opened last week in Notting Hill, west London, instantly becoming a go-to destination for readers and turning into a meeting spot for like-minded folk to share their love stories. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Sarah J Maas fans can get A Court of Thorns and Roses free on Audible

A dramatised version of the BookTok-hit romantasy novel can be enjoyed for free

Events

4 d. ago Children’s and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels

Pebbles on the beach; adventures in evolution; a search for sea nomads; furious gods; a history of LGBTQ+ activism and moreI’m Going to Make a Friend by Darren Chetty, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat, Little Tiger, £12.99When a child moves home, it can be hard to meet potential new pals. Perhaps it’s best to make a friend from what’s to hand? This warm, witty picture book is perfect for prompting chats about friendship.So Devin Wore a Skirt by Shireen Lalji and Lucy Fleming, Frances Lincoln, £7.99Devin has nothing special to wear for his Nanabapa’s big birthday until he spots his sister’s shimmery blue skirt. At first he hides it under layers of disguise, but when he finally reveals the skirt, it’s Nanabapa who takes Devin for a twirl on the dancefloor in this gentle, adorable picture book about acceptance. Continue reading...

Culture

4 d. ago A tense thriller that still lets you savour the tastes of France: The best Classic Crime novels out now

Barry Turner reviews the best Classic Crime out now.

Events

5 d. ago The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood audiobook review – a puzzle waiting to be decoded

Romance, sci-fi and family drama are thrillingly combined in this Booker-winning novel, shared between three narratorsIt’s 25 years since the publication of The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s intricately plotted, multi-narrative novel which led to her first Booker prize win. Blending romance, pulpy sci-fi and family drama, it opens with octogenarian Iris Chase Griffen recalling the moment she was told her sister, Laura, had driven off a bridge. The police inform her that two people witnessed Laura deliberately swerve off the road. Though Iris believes this to be true, she insists to the officers that it was an accident.We go on to hear about Iris’s privileged upbringing and marriage of convenience to Richard Griffen, the wealthy owner of a button factory, and her estrangement from her granddaughter with whom she hopes to reconcile. The book also contains excerpts from Laura’s posthumously published novel which features clandestine romantic encounters between an unnamed man – seem...

Politics

7 d. ago Saint Laurent’s Paris fashion week show takes audience on a holiday to Fire Island

Sunglasses and bright colours dominated a beach-ready collection, as director Anthony Vaccarello namechecked artists who documented LGBTQ+ lifeFire Island, the holiday destination near New York, has been associated with the LGBTQ+ community since the 30s. It has inspired books (Edmund White’s 1973 novel, Forgetting Elena), a 2022 eponymous romcom and now, a fashion show for Saint Laurent.Taking place at Paris fashion week in 30C heat more suited to a vacation, the show notes named the beach spot as a reference for the creative director, Anthony Vaccarello. They placed the show “somewhere between Paris and Fire Island, where escape becomes elegance, and desire becomes a language”. Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago Gabby Logan's kids are 'embarrassed' as she shares one thing she always does in public

BBC presenter Gabby Logan has shared an insight into her home life, admitting that her two teenage children become embarrassed when she does one particular thing in public

Politics

1 week ago Romance is in the air as new London bookshop selling only 'spicy novels' opens

England's first genre-specific bookshop has opened in London and is dedicated to selling 'spicy' novels from the BookTok-approved and widely popular romantasy genre

Culture

1 week ago From the drunk girl who knocked her own front teeth out to the father searching the garden bushes with a torch for couples having sex... One teenage girl's hair

As the youngest of four children, and the last teenager still living at home, I know for a fact there is an annual event my mum dreads more than anything else... the 'End of GCSEs House Party'.

Politics

1 week ago Experts warn this worrying parenting mistake may cause teens to be anxious and depressed

A new national poll by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital suggests that a rise in teen anxiety and depression may be linked to increasingly overprotective parenting.

Events

2 w. ago Children and teenage girls were blamed for crimes against them, ‘damning’ grooming gangs report finds

A ‘deeply disturbing’ report found organisations avoided race for fear of appearing racist or inflaming community tensions, Yvette Cooper said

Events

2 w. ago ‘Odd things happened when she was around’: the unnerving vision of Muriel Spark

From blackmail to burglary, the events of Spark’s life often uncannily echoed those of her novels – no wonder the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie believed she could predict the future“There is a supernatural process going on under the surface and within the substance of all things,” says a priest in Muriel Spark’s 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Spark believed herself wired into this process. The novelist was aware from the start of “a definite ‘something beyond myself’”, an “access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels”.“Somehow things happened, odd things, when Muriel was around,” recalled her friend Shirley Hazzard. “Everything that happened to Muriel,” according to her American editor Barbara Epler, “had been foreseen”, usually in her books themselves. If Spark wrote about blackmail, she too would be blackmailed; if she wrote about a burglary, she would then be burgled. Thirty years after toying with an idea for The Hoth...

Politics

2 w. ago AL Kennedy: ‘I get very fed up with depictions of glamorous sociopaths’

Ahead of her appearance at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, AL Kennedy talks to David Robinson about her latest novel, in which she explores the worlds of a ‘spy cop’ and an idealistic teacher

Politics

2 w. ago What was proposed as a basic taste by a chemist in 1908? The Saturday quiz

From Euphoria and Tattoo to Miniminter, KSI and Zeraa, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz1 What was proposed as a basic taste by chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1908?2 At the centre of the Milky Way, what is Sagittarius A*?3 Which Booker prize-winning novel has no named characters?4 Miniminter, KSI and Zerkaa are members of which collective?5 The helots were people subjugated by which city-state?6 Which official censored British theatre until 1968?7 Which sculpture stands by the A1 in Gateshead?8 San Miguel beer and Tanduay, the world’s bestselling rum, come from where?What links:9 Laputa; Nublar; Saint Marie; Skull; Sodor; Utopia?10 Castellaneta; Kavner; Cartwright; Smith?11 Frederick of Utrecht, 838; Thomas Becket, 1170; Óscar Romero, 1980?12 Chairman of ways and means; first deputy; second deputy?13 Dubris; Londinium; Verulamium; Venonis; Viroconium?14 Euphoria and Tattoo; What’s Another Year and Hold Me Now?15 1858 medical textbook; Shonda Rhimes and Ellen Pompeo? Continue read...

Politics

2 w. ago Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother’s loss

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

Politics

3 w. ago If we want kids to get off screens, adults have to do the same

As a group of schools tells parents to limit their smartphone usage, Helen Coffey argues that our behaviour is just as important when it comes to helping the next generation get off their devices and into the real world

Politics

3 w. ago Sex, grief and debauchery: Gráinne O’Hare on her blazing millennial novel Thirst Trap

As post-Sally Rooney Irish lit is booming, the 32-year-old writer talks to Ellie Harrison about her tale of a group of Belfast women stumbling through life and loss as they wave their twenties goodbye

Politics

3 w. ago ‘I’m here to open doors’: Bernardine Evaristo on success, controversy and why she plans to donate her £100k award

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 writersBack 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 –...

Economics

3 w. ago ‘No smartphones before 14; no social media until 16’: The Anxious Generation author on how to fight back against big tech

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 teenagersJonathan 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 ...

Culture

3 w. ago Horrors of addiction detailed in Tim MacGabhann's 'blisteringly brilliant' memoir

Irish writer Tim MacGabhann has lived many lives, as an acclaimed novelist and journalist writing on the cartels. His latest book The Black Pool lays his past addictions bare, he tells critic Aimee Walsh

Events