Books

As he unveiled Tesla’s new humanoid robot, Optimus, this September, Elon Musk spoke with characteristic flamboyance about the device’s potential. “This means a future of abundance,” he declared. “A future where there is no poverty … It really is a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it.” Perhaps deliberately, he was echoing the tone of his company’s namesake, Nikola Tesla, who in the 1890s was making similarly bold claims about his own work-in-progress. With his new system of wireless telegraphy, Tesla…

The English title of the latest novel in the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, and the first written by a woman, will be The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons.The first three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – were written by Larsson and published posthumously after his sudden death in 2004.Larsson had planned for the series to include 10 books, and in 2015 the next book in the series, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, written by David Lagercrantz,…

It’s a brave writer who takes on a retelling of Dickens, and of David Copperfield, the most personal of his novels, at that. And yet the American author Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – which transposes this very English, quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman to her own home territory of Appalachia – feels in many ways like the book she was born to write.The idealism and concern with social justice that are characteristic of Kingsolver’s worldview find their natural counterpart in Dickens’s impassioned social…

Many Chola women were actively involved in the life of the towns and villages they lived in, particularly that of the temple. Among the most active temple donors were the royal queens, who gifted extremely generously, particularly to the temples of their home towns. There are some women who stand out for not merely the extravagance of their gift-giving, but also for their impact across multiple spheres of life. They were respected and revered by king and commoner alike. One of the most truly exceptional women from Chola…

Losing religious faith can be a shattering experience, turning a universe that seemed full of providential order into a frightening and meaningless void. It is first of all an internal catastrophe – the voice of God falls silent, comforting certainties are overturned, notions of right and wrong vanish into thin air. This is surely one reason why writers of literature, the best means we have for depicting interiority, have been drawn again and again to the drama of faith and doubt in the individual soul. But a process that…

When the young Robert Zimmerman discovered folk music in the late 1950s, he was transfixed. It seemed weightier and more serious than anything he was hearing on the radio. Overnight, he shunned his old favourites Little Richard and Fats Domino for singers of songs that he considered to be deeper, sadder, more despairing and more triumphant than regular pop music. Having created a new persona and invented a wandering minstrel backstory he became a figurehead for the folk movement, a messianic singer. He then spent the next…

The third novel from acclaimed Australian author Robbie Arnott comes garlanded with high expectations, and within six pages it’s clear that despite its fey title, Limberlost stands a good chance of living up to them. Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent: “He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the…

Haruki Murakami is not one for getting out and about much. Famously, the Japanese’s novelist’s day consists of running, writing, listening to jazz and going to bed at nine o’clock. He doesn’t waste his time getting gussied up for television appearances or prize-giving shindigs; the organisers of literary festivals are used to having their invitations politely declined.That doesn’t mean, though, that Murakami wants to remove himself completely from the world. Indeed, in many ways he seems to long to be known by it. His…

More than 60% of parents in the UK will be spending less this year on Christmas presents for their children, a survey by BookTrust has found, as it launches its Christmas appeal to provide young people with books.The survey found that 59% of parents who celebrate Christmas have cut back on spending ahead of the festive season so they can afford to buy gifts for their children, but 62% still say they’ll be spending less than they usually do.Diana Gerald, chief executive of BookTrust, said that “the last two years were…

Everyone took to Ian Jack from the very first time they met him. I was no different and so in London, during the early Eighties, when my friend and publisher, Urvashi Butalia introduced me to Ian and his then wife Aparna Bagchi, friendship followed seamlessly. We became a kind of “Indian friends group”, meeting over lunch or dinner at each other’s London homes. I knew then that Ian was a very well respected and prominent British journalist, but he wore his success so lightly that his reputation was something we had only…