Books

A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned. The 30-year pursuit of deregulation in the building industry demonstrably contributed to the killing of 72 people…

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of four science books, including The Emperor of All Maladies, which won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction and the Guardian first book award. Born in Delhi in 1970 and educated at Stanford, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and Harvard, Mukherjee is now assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, as well as a cancer physician and researcher. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and their two daughters. His latest book, The Song of the Cell,…

Breadcrumb Trail Links Life Eating & Drinking Culture Books Make stuffed cabbage rolls, mapo tofu and vegetarian roast goose from chef Hannah Che's cookbook debut Get the latest from Laura Brehaut straight to your inbox Sign Up Publishing date: Oct 29, 2022  •  19 minutes ago  •  11 minute read  •  Join the conversation Clockwise from far left: finished stuffed cabbage rolls, mapo tofu, stuffed cabbage rolls in progress, and vegetarian roast goose. Photo by…

Nick Hornby on Emil and the Detectives by Erich KästnerNick Hornby. Photograph: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXMI turned 11 in April 1968, which was around the time the wheels came off the family car. They were already pretty loose. My father was one of those 1960s men who, in the pre-digital crossed-line age of phone boxes and busy signals and telegrams in an emergency, managed to start a second family without the first one knowing anything about it. When the truth was revealed (not to everyone – it would be another…

When Dee walks through the front door in Catriona Ward’s recent thriller The Last House on Needless Street, readers of gothic fiction find themselves in a familiar place. The house is “an underworld; a deep cave where lonely shafts of light fall on strange mounds, jagged broken things. Plywood is nailed over all the windows,” and the “whole place smells of death; not of rot or blood but dry bone and dust; like an old grave, long forgotten”.Dee is investigating the disappearance of her younger sister Lulu, 11 years…

Back in 2017, comic novelist and chronicler of Englishness Jonathan Coe met Liz Truss at a dinner at the French embassy. The event was also attended by Coe’s good friend Kazuo Ishiguro, who had recently been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. “Books didn’t seem to be her thing,” he says of the encounter. “We didn’t hit it off, put it like that.” Though we are speaking before she announced she was standing down as prime minister, Coe tells me he feels more uneasy now about the state of the UK than he did after the…

The book has a contentious title. Depending on how much you love or hate the ruling dispensation, “Undeclared Emergency” is certain to evoke contrary emotions. The “Politics of Resistance” in the strapline makes it clear that the book is also about citizens’ struggles against authoritarianism. But never mind the provocative title, the book presents an interesting legal perspective on what ails Indian democracy today and what is worth saving for the future generations. It is never easy to theorise the contemporary without…

How do you feel about the award? As someone who describes herself as an oral historian, what is it like to be welcomed by another discipline?It is an enormous honour to be recognized for the work, and particularly for it to find resonance in landscapes across the world from where it was written. As far as being welcomed by another discipline is concerned, perhaps this speaks to the malleability of Remnants as a project. When I began working on it, I too came from another discipline – visual art – and was able to carve a…

The narrative structure of Janice Pariat’s third novel Everything the Light Touches is like a matryoshka doll. Usually made of wood, these Russian-origin dolls are hollow figurines that separate in the middle to reveal a smaller figure inside, which in turn has another figure inside it, and so on. In Pariat’s book, stories part in the middle to reveal another story. And like the matryoshka dolls that usually follow a theme — folk tales or Soviet leaders — the stories in Pariat’s novel follow the themes of botany and…

Is it possible to find a precise date for what was perhaps the most important battle in our early history, the Kurukshetra war? I believe this is entirely possible using clues from a specific episode of the war.The fourteenth day of the Mahabharata war was a crucial one for both sides. On the evening of the thirteenth day, Arjuna, devastated by the death of his young son, Abhimanyu, had vowed that he would kill Jayadratha – the man he held responsible – by the sunset of the next day. If he could not, he would give up his…