Books

Kew Gardens features a hidden magical door in the winning book for this year’s £5,000 Waterstones children’s book prize.Greenwild: The World Behind the Door by Pari Thomson was voted the winner by Waterstones booksellers. The book “is a spellbinding triumph that will make children fall in love with the world they are reading about, and with reading itself,” said Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones.The book follows Daisy as she searches for her missing mother and discovers another world behind a hidden doorway in…

In an NDTV interview, Manju Kapur showcased her giant library, exuding an aura of both an academic and a passionate reader. She then reveals the books that made her. She expresses her gratitude to Annie Proulx, whom she has oddly begun to resemble; she says she is amused by Margaret Atwood’s humour, that she envies Vladimir Nabokov, and derives pleasure from the works of Amitav Ghosh and James Herriot. You see that though she has devoted her life to portraying women as independent prisoners, her interest goes beyond…

Tom Burgis is a “dishonest journalist” whose latest book is a “fucking pack of lies” – or at least that’s what the first paragraph of Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth, the book in question, says.Burgis, an investigative reporter for the Guardian, is not being unusually self-deprecating in that introduction, but instead relaying the verdict of the man at the centre of Cuckooland’s story. That man is Mohamed Amersi, whose public persona is that of a prolific donor to the Conservative party, a philanthropist who has…

If Emma Stone’s new film Poor Things is anything to go by, it was tricky to get the Victorians to keep their clothes on and their hands to themselves. All the same, their reputation as humourless puritans with a sideline in sadism took most of the 20th century to dislodge. Here are five of the best books that track how the Victorians gradually unravelled and learned to let loose.In these four savage pen portraits, Lytton Strachey, Bloomsbury’s resident trickster, takes down the great and the good of the previous…

‘Our People. Scattered to your four winds … They land, but do they grow where they fall?” This “half-dreamy, half-sad” question, addressed by a Ghanaian father to his son Kwame, haunts Michael Donkor’s second novel. It casts doubt on the promised land of dream and opportunity that drives so many diasporic narratives: one where first-generation immigrants sweat and save, so that the second generation enjoys a better education and life.Education is key here, as Kwame is an out gay English teacher in a London state school,…

At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and…

How has your idea of home changed over the years? Author Manav Kaul (Kunal Patil/ Hindustan Times) The memory of home is so interesting. I live in a fictional world because I write fiction. I am more excited by memories of home and its people than the physical place itself. When I visit the places where I grew up or the places from where I started a career in theatre, I am often disappointed because the memory of those places is so much bigger. In that sense, I carry my home with me. Hindustan Times - your…

One day, Liz Jensen’s son, Raphaël, meets death in the garden. It’s a bird: a great tit that he picks up and brings inside. ‘‘I found a sleeping bird,’’ he says to his mother, who explains that this particular bird will not be waking up. They dig a hole for it and hold a funeral. “Not a bird any more, we tell him. Underground, it will rot and magic into something else. But this makes no sense to him. He puts snail shells on the little grave and howls.”At the age of 25, Raphaël meets death again. He is on a training run in…

Mary Jean Chan, Caleb Azumah Nelson and AK Blakemore are among the shortlistees for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.The award, worth £20,000, celebrates poetry, novels, short stories and drama by writers aged 39 and under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Catherine Lacey and Joshua Jones also made the shortlist. Jones was the only debut author selected, with his short story collection Local Fires, inspired by real events and people in his home town of…

Buchi Emecheta’s journey – from orphaned child, through marital oppression, single motherhood and societal prejudice, to fulfilment as an internationally acclaimed writer – though often described in terms of a rags-to-riches tale is better characterised as one woman’s dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream. Recurrent themes in her novels – motherhood, female independence and freedom through education – are all the more powerful since they are never far from her own real-life experiences. Although it is easy to…