27 h. ago How hard can it be to run 13 miles? With help from the pub, park and peas I am finding out | Barry Glendenning

Goaded by my colleague into a half-marathon, I can’t say I’m enjoying the training but I’m slowly improving, and at least Great Ormond Street benefitsMy name is Barry and I’m a runner. As a clinically obese 52-year-old Irishman who regularly binge drinks (the NHS’s joyless definition, not my own), I would love to be able to say I took up running for health reasons but that would be a lie. Truth be told, I was railroaded into it by my Football Weekly associate Max Rushden, who publicly challenged me to run the London Landmarks Half-Marathon after I had belittled the efforts of a friend who completed it by asking: “How hard can running 13 miles be?” To cut an already short story shorter, in April I hope to plod from Whitehall, past Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament across Westminster Bridge, along Victoria Embankment and on to Trafalgar Square in the company of more than 20,000 fellow runners, most of whom should finish in front of me if they have so much as a modicum of shame.I will ...

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44 h. ago Glencairn Glass raises a toast to return of Crime Short Story Competition

The award-winning East Kilbride family glassware business Glencairn Crystal has teamed up with the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival.

Events

50 h. ago I completed the tough Disney World bar crawl where you down drinks in ELEVEN countries

WITH my Minnie Mouse ears on, I’m stood in an Italian piazza with a glass of Prosecco in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. My friend has a pint of German beer and we click glasses to raise a toast in the Florida sun. It's all very confusing. When it comes...

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3 d. ago Rutherglen MP Michael Shanks launches annual short story competition

Last year, 14 local schools took part and almost 500 entries were submitted.

Politics

8 d. ago Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present

From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?This year marks 100 years since the first demonstration of television in London. Elizabeth II sent the first royal email in 1976. The first meeting of the Lancashire Association of Change Ringers took place in 1876. All notable anniversaries. But I’m going with 2026 as the 85th anniversary of a great short story: Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). It’s about chance, labyrinths and an impossible novel. Ts’ui Pên, an ancestor of the narrator, sets himself the task of writing a novel with a cast of thousands: “an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time”. In most novels, when a character reaches a fork in the path, they must choose: this way, or that way. Yet in Ts’ui Pên’s novel, all possible paths are chosen. This creates “a growing, dizzying web of divergent,...

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2 w. ago This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin – set to be a standout novel of 2026

From an acclaimed short-story writer, this epic of power and class across generations in Pakistan is brutal, funny and brilliantly toldImagine a shattering portrayal of Pakistani life through a chain of interlocking novellas, and you’ll be somewhere close to understanding the breadth and impact of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first novel. Reminiscent of Neel Mukherjee’s dazzling circular depiction of Indian inequalities, A State of Freedom, it’s a keenly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed short-story collection with which he made his debut in 2009, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – also portraying overlapping worlds of Pakistani class and culture.We begin in the squalor and bustle of a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, where the heartbreaking figure of a small child, abandoned to his fate and clutching a pair of plastic shoes, is scooped under the protection of a tea stall owner. He proceeds to raise the boy as his own son, having only daughters, but Yazid is also adopted by the stall’...

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3 w. ago ‘Like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodóvar’: 10 debut novels to look out for in 2026

A Pulitzer finalist is among the first-time novelists, in tales of love, a surreal prison, teen murder and a tradwifeBelgrave RoadManish Chauhan (Faber, January)An affecting tale of loneliness and love in Chauhan’s home town of Leicester, Belgrave Road tells the story of Mira, newly arrived in the UK from India following an arranged marriage, and Tahliil, a Somali cleaner who becomes her lunch partner, and her escape. By day, Chauhan is a finance lawyer; his debut novel follows his shortlisting in last year’s BBC short story competition.This Is Where the Serpent LivesDaniyal Mueenuddin (Bloomsbury, January)The Pakistani-American writer’s 2009 story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was a Pulitzer finalist. Like his debut, hHis first novel is set in Pakistan, moving between bustling cities and agricultural estates, interrogating the country’s class dynamics through an epic portrait spanning six decades. Continue reading...

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