Books

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin is perhaps best known for her novel Fever Dream, adapted for Netflix in 2021, but her short stories are equally celebrated. Her latest collection (published in Spanish in 2015 and meticulously translated by Megan McDowell) focuses on the domestic in disarray.The most striking of the seven tales, Breath from the Depths, is also the longest. Lola is sick and her memory is failing: “she wanted to die, but every morning, inevitably, she woke up again”. Her ordered existence – facilitated…

Royal books. Where do they come from and what the hell are they for? Somewhat to my surprise, in recent years I’ve enjoyed several serious biographies of regal personages, the best of these being Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, a story of sex, sulking and 12-course dinners. I’ve also, on occasion, been known to gobble up the kind of high-class insider gossip favoured by Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair (you’d have to be half dead not to enjoy bits of The Palace Papers). But until now, I’ve never…

On an April afternoon in 1978, Haruki Murakami was sitting in the stands of Jingu Stadium in Tokyo watching a baseball game when he underwent a life-changing epiphany. It happened just as a player for his local team struck a ball into left field, to the delight of the home crowd. “In that instant,” he writes, “and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.”Within six months, Murakami had written his first book, a short novel called Hear the Wind Sing. He sent the only manuscript…

Surrender begins with the U2 singer and activist nearly dying and ends with him being born. Both episodes are floridly written, a kind of poetic grandiloquence that tempers a default long-windedness throughout these 40 chapters (the “songs” of the title).But you don’t come to the 500+-page memoir by a big-mouth vocalist of a squillion-selling stadium act for pithiness. If Paul Hewson was born with “an eccentric heart” (a medical condition, rather than a metaphysical state), he also has 130% of a civilian’s lung capacity…

Born in 1979, Irene Vallejo is a Spanish writer, historian and philologist, and a regular columnist in the newspaper El País. She had written several books, including novels, essays and children’s books before she published El infinito en un junco (Infinity in a Reed), which won a number of prizes in Spain including the National Essay prize and spent 18 months in the bestsellers’ list there. Mario Vargas Llosa has described the book as “a masterpiece” and it has now been published in 30 countries. The English translation…

Breadcrumb Trail Links Life Eating & Drinking Culture Books Make good use of salt-preserved lemons in Naomi Duguid's warming bean soup and slow-cooked lamb shoulder Get the latest from Laura Brehaut straight to your inbox Sign Up Clockwise from top left: Salt-Preserved Lemons, Warming Bean Soup with Salt-Preserved Lemon and Miso, Salt-Preserved Lemons, and Slow-Cooked Lamb Shoulder with Anchovies and Rosemary from The Miracle of Salt. Photo by Richard Jung Reviews and…

The greatest living writer on the English countryside will celebrate his 100th birthday this week at his Suffolk farmhouse, surrounded by the friends he calls his “dear ones”. Ronald Blythe is best known for Akenfield, his moving and intimate portrait of a Suffolk village through the lives of its residents, which became an instant classic when published in 1969. But Blythe, who has spent all his 10 decades living within 50 miles of where he was born, has also devoted millions more words – in history, fiction, and luminous…

My first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979, is fewer than 200 pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it. I ran a jazz cafe, and I spent my 20s labouring from morning to night to pay off debts. But the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff – my favourites being translations of Russian novels and English-language…

In Mona Arshi’s debut novel, which has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize (the winner is announced next week), a British-Indian girl named Ruby suddenly stops speaking. She recalls how, after a teacher asked her a question at school, “I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again.” Ruby is tested for aural dysfunction, assorted viruses and “general stupidity”, and shrugs off the efforts of peers, teachers and her therapist to…

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