Books

Prince Harry’s forthcoming memoir, Spare, is unlikely to be championed by independent bookshops because of how heavily it has been discounted by larger retailers, according to booksellers.Spare will be published on 10 January by Penguin Random House, with the recommended retail price set at £28. However, it is already being offered at a discount by Waterstones, Foyles and Amazon, all of which are selling it for £14. Even at preorder stage, the book is in the Top 10 in Amazon’s bestsellers list.Amanda Truman from Truman…

Peter Apps’ book about the Grenfell Tower fire and the subsequent inquiry is an essential work of journalistic scrutiny. The author is deputy editor at Inside Housing and has covered the story meticulously over the past five and a half years. His account is extraordinarily difficult to read, not because his writing isn’t clear and direct throughout – it is – but because Show Me the Bodies is a document not of a tragedy, but of an atrocity.Overnight on 14 June 2017, 72 people – elderly, middle-aged, young, newborn – died…

Man cannot get away from food as apart from being requisite nourishment, cultural practices, myths and rituals sustain the partaking of it. Does the desire for food trigger sensory undercurrents that reverberate with ambition, passion, pleasure, jealousy, insecurities and identity? Is the kitchen a repository of delight and contentment or a site for lewdness and heinous crimes? These are the questions that Urdu author Khalid Jawed examines in Nemat Khana. Translated into English by Baran Farooqi as The Paradise of Food,…

For only the 13th time in 120 years, France’s oldest and most celebrated literary award the Prix Goncourt was won by a woman on Thursday.Brigitte Giraud, 56, a French writer of novels and short stories was declared winner with Vivre Vite (Live Fast) after the jury voted 14 times.After a final vote ended in stalemate, the president of the Goncourt Academy cast a deciding vote, choosing Giraud over her closest rival Giuliano da Empoli.Vivre Vite is a short autobiographical story in which Giraud recounts the chain of events…

Tim Spector, an epidemiologist and co-founder of the ZOE nutrition study, wants to change the way people think about food. His 2015 book The Diet Myth popularised the idea that each of us has a unique and constantly changing gut microbiome that is crucial to our health. Spoon-Fed, in 2020, exposed diet misinformation. Food for Life, at over 500 pages, overlaps with these but offers more information than ever before. It aims to think about food for “our individual health, the health of our society and the health of our…

Gil has just moved from Manhattan to an expensive neighbourhood in Phoenix, Arizona. Thanks to his inherited wealth, the house he is moving into is palatial – his nickname for it is “the castle”. The view of the house next door, however, is its most striking feature, as the wall that faces his windows is made entirely of glass. He can watch the neighbouring family as if they were fish in an aquarium.This seems to set us up for a strange and unsettling story. Magnifying this effect is the laconic minimalism of the prose.…

Author of business books, Nishka Rathi (42) who devours fiction for Young Adults, believes books meant squarely for adults are often cynical and predictable. She particularly returns to the work of Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett because “the way their books tackle situations and talk about reality is neither highly depressing nor very positive.” Rathi believes adults see people through many filters: “’Oh, they’re from this community, or that area, so they’re like this’. But kids see things as they are. So in…

Cells build organisms from the ground up, and therefore to choose to write about them is to give oneself permission to explore almost any aspect of the living world. They are “a life within a life” as Siddhartha Mukherjee puts it in his latest book, which takes advantage of that licence to offer a comprehensive account of basic biology, alongside a history of the many great minds that have helped us to see beyond widespread misconceptions to scientific truth.This is not just about clear-cut successes: alongside the…

In a country like India where homophobia and transphobia are rampant, what gave you the confidence to write a graphic novel around the life of a non-binary teenager? I don’t write stories because I am confident. I don’t know if I have any confidence. I write because I need to tell a story. So, honestly, there was no thought process or fear of rejection. When that doesn’t exist, there is freedom. In hindsight, I do feel that a lot of the phobia that we as the older generation carry, the younger lot don’t. So it is easier…

When I finished Stephen Collins’ book on how Ireland responded to Britain’s decision to leave the EU, a tale of shrewd politicking and diplomacy in Dublin, an image came to mind: a mouse whispering to an elephant, which then calmly sits on and squashes a chest-beating gorilla.No prizes for guessing which one was the UK. Boris Johnson’s myths about Brussels dictating the shape of bananas, after all, paved Brexit, a dreamland where Britain would be king in a new jungle.That his country still finds itself pinned under a…