The precarity and dreams of thirtysomething Londoners are adroitly explored in this tender portrait of contemporary queer lifeLondon has long been both literary character and setting, showing its many different faces in fiction from Oliver Twist to Mrs Dalloway, Zadie Smith’s NW to Andrew O’Hagan’s newly published Caledonian Road. Now Evenings and Weekends,...

Vibrant essays from the author of The Argonauts touch on art, inspiration, and many of the central dilemmas of our times“As a child I had so much energy I’d lie awake and feel my organs smolder,” Maggie Nelson wrote in 2005’s Jane: A Murder. She was a dancer before she was a writer and you can feel the commitment to the fire of bodily motion in her...

Audiobooks are fast becoming ‘a major route to market for consumers of books’, the trade body saysThe number of UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% between 2022 and 2023, according to new data from the Publishers Association (PA).Revenue from audiobooks rose 24% across the same period to £206m in 2023, reflecting an increase in the number of audiobook...

The British poet’s second collection is an exacting examination of the past, the present and an uncertain futurePoetry is a form of scrutiny, an inquiry that, when it succeeds, advances further than it is possible to go in prose. Rowland Bagnall’s attractively questing second collection is an investigation of consciousness. Like Virginia Woolf, he records...

This evocative account of the author’s mother and aunt – identical sisters who stole the hearts of London’s 1930s intelligentsia – captures their closeness and lust for lifeSomewhere in her house – though not, I think, in an attic – Ariane Bankes keeps a battered tin trunk, the precious contents of which enabled her to write this short biography of...

In an age of climate crisis and AI, equal treatment is nothing less than essentialIn the three decades since I became a lawyer, human rights – once understood as an uncomplicated good, a tool for securing dignity for the vulnerable against abuses by the powerful – have increasingly come under assault. Perhaps never more so than in the current moment:...