BOOKLOVES

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, […]

An atmospheric, genre-bending memoir that transforms life’s smallest detours into profound moments of revelation In It Happened. Make of It What You Will, Joanna Potepa resists tidy generic classification, blending memoir, travel writing, and personal essay into a mosaic of what she calls “still frames:” brief moments in which ordinary experience takes on unexpected significance.  […]

Some novels are built for solitary reading. Others practically beg to be argued about over wine and someone’s good cheese board. How to Find Love in the Cereal Aisle by Alissa DeRogatis belongs firmly to the second group, which makes sense once you learn the publisher tucked a reading group guide into the back of […]