Books

Dear Reader, "Children’s books are the most important books of all. They’re the ones that make us readers in the first place. And because they come first, they shape us most profoundly, giving us ways to think about the world and our experience of it, opening windows to other worlds, other experiences," says S F Said, Lebanese British author of the award-winning Varjak Paw. To celebrate the upcoming Children’s Day, here are six sets of stunning books for you — profound and page-turning, with stories of our earth and its…

The bare bones of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel sound a little unprepossessing: it begins shortly before the first world war with a young boy, James Ramsay, asking his parents if they can visit the lighthouse near the family’s summer house on the Isle of Skye, after which a discussion about the weather ensues. It goes on to chronicle a day in the life of the Ramsay parents, their eight children and their gaggle of house guests, who include a young artist, Lily Briscoe, who is painting Mrs Ramsay’s portrait; a prickly young…

My earliest reading memoryEnid Blyton’s The Adventures of Mr Pink-Whistle. A pixie-man with a black cat who went around helping children and putting things right. He could turn invisible and had a crew of magic friends who assisted on his missions. He was my hero at age six, and I didn’t think his name was anything other than gangster.My favourite book growing upThe Choose Your Own Adventure series by Edward Packard and others. Aside from the interactive element, it was my first introduction to horror, science fiction,…

Almost 20% of children’s books now feature characters of colour, according to a new survey, but many still put forward “poorly represented characters” and contain “difficult and damaging portrayals”.The Reflecting Realities survey, conducted by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), is now in its fifth year and monitors the diversity within children’s books in the UK.Of the 5,383 children’s picture books, fiction and non-fiction from 2021 assessed for the latest report, 1,059 (or 20%) featured a character of…

The books of Kurt Vonnegut, who was born 100 years ago this Friday, are funny, unflinching, soft-hearted, stark, imaginative and approachable – and just as relevant now as when he published his debut novel 70 years ago. Start on one of his best books and you’ll quickly see why he’s held in such rare affection by his fans: “Uncle Kurt,” this year’s Booker winner Shehan Karunatilaka calls him.The opening words of Vonnegut’s most famous book Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) – “All this happened, more or less” – sound like a modern…

Are we really going to need the audiobook version? From the very first page, the author’s unmistakable voice ricochets between the reader’s ears: giggling, provoking, digressing, seducing and dropping deadpan little hints about his own life.Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Quentin Tarantino has published his first work of movie criticism, a study of his personal favourites from the New American Cinema era, including superb, boisterous pieces on Peter Yates’s Bullitt, John G Avildsen’s Joe, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry,…

A collaborative writing duo has won the £10,000 Goldsmiths prize for the first time in the award’s history, for a book which took 10 years to complete.Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams’s Diego Garcia, described by judge Ali Smith as an “extraordinary achievement”, was named the winner of the prize on Thursday evening. It was the first in-person ceremony in three years for the prize, which “celebrates fiction at its most novel”. Photograph: FitzcarraldoThe book is about two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver, who move…

Your new book is grand and audacious. You’ve placed real life historical figures, Goethe and Linnaeus, alongside fictional ones. While separated by centuries and geographies, they are linked by similar philosophies. Collectively, they share a deep connect with the world of plants. What was the germination point of this book? The idea began as a tiny seed in a garden in the UK in 2014, which to our post-pandemic selves feels almost as long ago as the 1700s! I came across this section on the extraordinary lives of women…

When a filmmaker embarks on a journey into the past to write a book on a great actor, the challenges for the reviewer are many. The first is getting past the awe with which the author approaches his subject. This is understandable considering the author Suman Ghosh is writing about Soumitra Chatterjee, one of the greatest actors of Indian cinema. The second challenge is to discover if the author has been able to view his subject, who died before this project began, objectively. The third is to figure out if a sentimental…

It’s no surprise that Melvin Burgess, author of Junk and many other powerful novels for teenagers, has chosen the Norse god Loki as the subject of his first adult novel: questioning, tricksy, gender-bending and anti-authority, Loki is perhaps the quintessential teen.We have not been short of treatments of Norse myth in fiction over the last few years. AS Byatt’s Ragnarok was exhilarating, richly wrought, written through the lens of her child self’s encounters, and with a focus on the end of the world. More recently, Neil…