BOOKLOVES

An inspiring reminder that the greatest souvenirs from travel are the insights we bring home Carol McIlwain’s Managing the Bucket List: The Journey Begins Volume II continues the ambitious project begun in Volume I. This time, McIlwain’s collection of travel experiences evolves into something more unexpected: an attempt to understand the world through history, culture, […]

A greedy politician, a woman fighting for her family’s land—a charming fantasy about saving the magical creatures who call this place home.  When Lia’s Aunt Melissa passes away, she is not surprised to learn she has inherited the family home they have lived on for generations. She is, however, surprised to learn the land is […]

A third of the way into the new Marlon James novel, The Disappearers, the rehearsal collapses, and the seven men in the room start telling each other the worst thing that has ever happened to them. One says a friend’s house was set alight around him with people waiting at both doors, and that he […]

Roughly halfway through Emma Cline’s new novel, Switzy, a nine-year-old boy sits on the edge of his bed in a house in Marylebone and plays a symphony off his phone for his grandfather, who has asked to hear it. The orchestra is learning it for a showcase. The boy calls it the farewell symphony. Switzy […]

There is a moment early on in May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry where the narrator is in a supermarket, unable to decide what she can bear to eat. She picks up a whole chicken, and afterwards her hand is tacky, and she keeps opening and closing her fist to test the stickiness. […]

An inventive, deeply personal journey across the multiverse, where the hardest thing to outrun is loneliness “My experience of her song was a projection of mine unsung.” The first novel in The Kikiloa Chronicles by Erik D. Larson isn’t easy to define. Part speculative fiction, part time-travel adventure, and part philosophical debate, it asks whether […]

I read the Booker Prize 2026 longlist announcement on my phone, standing up, and the first thing I thought was: a man in a bag. Somebody has written a novel about a man who gets paid to sit in university lectures inside a large black bag, and five serious judges have put it on the […]

Most preparation lists for a film adaptation are wildly optimistic about your calendar. They hand you eleven books and a chart of the Greek pantheon and assume you have retired. So let me try something more useful and organise what to read before Nolan’s Odyssey by the only variable that matters, which is how much […]

A genuine, textured portrait of a family on the front lines and home fronts of WWII Searching for Harold: One Family’s World War II Story in Letters is Stephen Watts’s second venture into epistolary family history. Watts’s comfort with genealogy is evident in his treatment of the sizable correspondence of the Watts and Carleton families, […]