BOOKLOVES

A quirky, genre-bending meditation on communication in all its forms  The title of Frederick David’s The Memoir of a Student is, on the face of it, misleading. The work is a hodgepodge of genres that the word “memoir” fails to convey, and David, who returns to school following what he describes as years of “peripatetic” […]

A big-hearted fantasy adventure about belonging, self-acceptance, and what makes a home worth protecting Jeremy D. Scholz’s Magnus and the Last Dragon follows fourteen-year-old Magnus, a foster kid who’s never felt like he belongs. At six-foot-two, he’s nearly impossible to overlook, yet somehow, he still feels invisible. His foster family cares for him, but the […]

One winter morning in 1958, a woman walks out of a lodge on Mount Shasta carrying an axe. The sign over her own driveway bears the name of the character that made her rich, engraved on a placard she paid a fortune for, and she swings at the left post until the wood gives. Her […]

Three dishes wrapped in foil are sitting on the porch when she opens the door. Nobody is there. There are no footprints in the snow, no tyre marks, no sound of anyone hurrying away. She decides they must be shy neighbours, the quietly decent Midwestern sort who believe food says everything a person needs to, […]

The Determinists reopens the free will debate because what’s at stake could shape how we hold each other accountable. In this thought-provoking work of philosophical nonfiction, Lawrence David Rose takes on one of philosophy’s oldest questions: Do human beings genuinely possess free will, or are our thoughts and actions simply the inevitable byproducts of biology, […]

A man takes a job washing pots in a restaurant cellar at one in the morning, because the night shift pays five marks a week more and he has a family. He is a police officer, recently demoted as far down the ladder as it goes, and a colleague asks why he bothers with this […]

A grey-haired woman who manages a video-rental shop comes into the luxury goods store three doors down, embarrassed to be there at all. Her only son is getting married. She has been putting money aside for his bride since before he had a girlfriend. The saleswoman shows her pearl studs first, then diamonds, and quietly […]

Seven weeks. That is what stands between the Booker Prize 2026 shortlist and the ceremony at Old Billingsgate on 9 November, and it is enough time to read all six if you start now and pick the order sensibly. I did the reading for the thirteen-book longlist over the summer, so for once I can […]