12 h. ago The latest Very discount codes to know about, including 15% off World Book Day costumes and books

From children’s toys to tech and fashion, we’ve got you covered with the latest Very voucher codes

Politics

12 h. ago The latest Very discount codes to know about, including 15% off World Book Day costumes

From children’s toys to tech and fashion, we’ve got you covered with the latest Very discount codes

Politics

13 h. ago The best holidays to book for April 2025, from Greek beach breaks to Wiltshire narrowboats

Whether it’s late skiing in the French Alps or a beach holiday in India, here’s some inspiration for a trip this spring

Culture

13 h. ago When is World Book Day 2025? Date, £1 books, and fun ways to celebrate 30 years

Discover when World Book Day 2025 is happening and get inspired with creative costume ideas for the kids

Economics

13 h. ago Charli XCX pokes fun at BRIT win as her 'Songwriter of the Year' nod divides fans

The bestselling 'Brat' queen has poked fun at her own 'Songwriter of the Year' win after social media users critiqued her writing for being "too simplistic" and "repetitive"

Politics

14 h. ago Most banned books feature people of color and LGBTQ+ people, report finds

Study counteracts claims by conservative lawmakers that books being removed from classrooms are sexually explicitThe majority of banned books in US public schools last year dealt with people of color, LGBTQ+ people and other demographics, according to a new study from PEN America.The report also counteracts claims by conservative lawmakers that books being removed from classrooms are sexually explicit and that book bans are altogether a “hoax”, an assertion made by Donald Trump. Continue reading...

Events

16 h. ago Carrion Crow by Heather Parry review – body horror with historical bite

The ‘mad woman in the attic’ is an archetypal force to be reckoned with in this gothic tale of metamorphosisYou don’t tend to encounter much body horror in historical fiction. We have our bold innovators, to be sure, but for many the archaic and the genteel remain oddly synonymous. The good news, if that’s you, is that there’s almost no swearing in Heather Parry’s new novel. The bad news is that it’s vile and unspeakable in almost every other way. But don’t let that put you off. Carrion Crow may be set in a fetid late Victorian London and couched in lightly brocaded prose, but what lurks within is unmistakably red in tooth and claw, a creature nearer in kinship to Kathy Acker than to Sarah Waters.The body undergoing the horrors belongs, in this instance, to Marguerite Périgord, the daughter of a French noblewoman in reduced circumstances. When the wayward Marguerite attracts a suitor, a strenuously unromantic solicitor named Mr Lewis, Cécile Périgord isn’t taking any chances. In a s...

Events

19 h. ago AD FEATURE: Unleash your talent and discover your potential with an electrifying music degree from the University of South Wales

Take the first step towards your future and don't forget to book your place at the university's open day on March 22

Culture

20 h. ago Seized, settled, let: how Airbnb and Booking.com help Israelis make money from stolen Palestinian land

As Israel deploys tanks in the West Bank for the first time in 20 years, we reveal how two of the world’s biggest travel companies are helping settlers commercialise stolen landThe villa is stunning. The private swimming pool; the lush, landscaped terrace with firepit; the long dining table with its expansive balcony view; the pingpong table; the piano.But the jewel in the crown, according to the Airbnb listing, is the experience of watching the sun rise over the nearby mountains from the luxury of the generous master bedroom. Continue reading...

Politics

20 h. ago The Golden Throne by Christopher de Bellaigue review – Suleyman returns

A new instalment of the extraordinary and brutal story of the greatest Ottoman sultan reads like a thrilling novelThe year is 1538 and Suleyman the Magnificent has taken to signing himself “the great lord and conqueror of the whole world”. The Holy Roman Emperor might have something to say about that. Charles V is still in charge over the other side of the Ottoman empire’s European borders, from the Danube to the Baltic. All the same, there is no denying Suleyman’s vast reach. Since coming to the throne 18 years earlier he has invaded Belgrade, Rhodes, much of Hungary, Baghdad and too many Mediterranean ports to mention. He has conquered most of North Africa. True, there have been a few hitches – he failed to capture Vienna in 1529 – but still, as he sits on his golden perch in Istanbul, he is pretty much lord of all he surveys.In his previous book, The Lion House, Christopher de Bellaigue charted Suleyman’s rise to power in rich, sinuous detail. Here, he takes the story o...

Politics

23 h. ago The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat’

Over 50 years, she has become one of the most revered writers in Australia. Is she finally going to get worldwide recognition?In early January, the Australian author Helen Garner decided to cut back an unruly bush in her garden. Garner lives in a Melbourne suburb in the adjoining house to her daughter, son-in-law, three grandchildren, some chickens and a dog. The family were away at the beach for the holidays and Garner found herself alone, in an off-kilter frame of mind. She’s 82, her beach days are over, but she felt her family’s absence. Her grandchildren were growing up, the youngest now 18. Garner realised she was on the brink of a loneliness not felt since she’d moved to live alongside them 20 years ago, after the end of her third and final marriage, to the author Murray Bail.Missing her family, feeling adrift, she went outside with some secateurs and “pruned the shit” out of the bush in such frenzied bursts that the next day, when she looked out of the window, she saw a scene...

Politics

37 h. ago WWE Elimination Chamber 2025: predictions and fantasy booking weekend's PLE event on Netflix

Predictions and how the Road to Wrestlemania 41 could shape up after WWE Elimination Chamber: Toronto

Politics

41 h. ago Don’t Make Me Laugh by Julia Raeside review – more monstrous men

The relationship between a predatory male comedian and a female producer rings true in this darkly funny debutAli is a radio producer; Ed is a comedian. Ali is vulnerable; Ed is charming. Ali is desperate to be loved; Ed is ready to love her.And Ed is a predator. Ali is prey. Continue reading...

Politics

44 h. ago Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie review – a tale of four women

The Nigerian-American author returns with an astute and moving exploration of female experience‘Novels had always felt to me truer than what was real,” declares a character in Dream Count, the highly anticipated new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is a statement echoed in the accompanying author’s note, which contends that the “point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it”. Since the publication of her extraordinarily assured debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003, Adichie’s fiction has performed this task of seeing, interpreting and questioning to huge acclaim, garnering her major awards as well as a public profile far beyond most writers, whose work hasn’t been sampled by Beyoncé.In keeping with her superstar status, Dream Count is billed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making” and is perhaps the surest bet so far for this year’s Women’s prize. However, ...

Politics

67 h. ago When It Rained for a Million Years by Paul Farley – thrilling leaps of imagination

An impressive collection of poems – largely set in industrial wastelands and musing on time and distance – makes the mundane magicalThe deluge of abstract thought in Paul Farley’s sixth collection, When It Rained for a Million Years, flows impressively far and wide. In this startlingly imaginative work, blood runs backwards and language itself has eyes – somehow, each word on the page “looks back, puzzled, like it dwells / on distances – between dip / and driving quill”.The “distances” these poems span are unremarkable in geographic terms. Farley is fond of scruffy car parks and cooling towers, PO boxes and photocopiers, taxi cabs and chimney stacks. I cannot always follow the beauty he sees in bus timetables or in a study of stacked chairs. But although the height of glamour involves a flying visit to the dismal grey of Heathrow, this subverted play on grandeur only renders his imagery more sublime. In one poem, a flag memorably “shivers like / a bolt of silk on a bed of nails, / o...

Politics

68 h. ago Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya; The South by Tash Aw review – love under the eye of the law

Two contrasting but equally impressive Asia-set coming-of-age novels explore gay teenagers navigating their nascent sexuality against the backdrop of personal and political upheavals What makes sex so natural a subject for fiction isn’t simply prurience, but rather the drama built into the evergreen question of how private desire finds expression, not least when the law’s looking. Two new novels, both set in Asia and centred on the coming of age of gay men, play out against the legacy of section 377, the Victorian penal code criminalising homosexuality in British colonies – repealed in 2018 in India, where Santanu Bhattacharya’s Deviants unfolds, and still applicable in Malaysia, the setting of Tash Aw’s The South, the first of a planned quartet from the two-time Booker longlistee.Deviants, Bhattacharya’s second novel, hops with buttonholing vim around three gay men across three generations over the past half-century to draw surprising contrasts and continuities of experience amid l...

Politics

3 d. ago Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

Trump administration escalates movement forged by US states to censor literature in full-scale DEI crackdownWhen the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago 2,000 year old book about Roman emperors enters bestseller charts

The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, details everything from ancient policy failures to sex scandalsA gossipy account of the lives of Roman emperors has entered the bestseller charts – 2,000 years after it was written. Sex scandals and foreign policy failures don’t only beleaguer the modern politician, it turns out: in the early second century, the scholar Suetonius chronicled the dramas of the first set of Roman emperors, and now, their indiscretions and eccentricities have been dug up in a new translation which is proving popular in bookshops.The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, made the Sunday Times hardback nonfiction chart this week. Publisher Penguin Classics said that the book is the first of their hardback nonfiction classics to appear on the list. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago 14 best feminist books to read ahead of International Women’s Day 2025

From 20th-century classics to modern-day manifestos, our suggestions run the gamut

Politics

3 d. ago In brief: My Favourite Mistake; Homeseeking; The Meteorites: Encounters With Outer Space and Deep Time – review

Marian Keyes’s engaging tale of fresh starts and old flames; a kaleidoscopic family drama spanning six decades; and an absorbing study of ancient rocks from spaceMarian KeyesPenguin, £9.99, pp624 (paperback) Continue reading...

Politics