Latest features and reviews

<p>Elif Shafak: ‘I used to want to run away into my imagination’</p>

The Saturday Interview

Elif Shafak: ‘A novelist in Turkey can be almost digitally lynched’

Nearly two decades after being put on trial for ‘insulting Turkishness’, Shafak has become one of the UK’s most popular authors. Ahead of her appearance at the Hay Festival, she speaks with Annabel Nugent about her latest novel and Turkey’s fraught politics

<p>The writer’s posthumous book paints a ‘charcoal portrait of a writer and a mother at the end of her tether’</p>

McCrum on Books

Inside Joan Didion’s mind: The saddest book you will read all year

<p>Originally designed for situations where a father without custody would remove their child and take them abroad, the Hague Convention has drifted dangerously way from its original purpose</p>

Extract

How a child abduction law is being weaponised against abused mothers

<p>Bestselling author of ‘Why Women Grow’ returns with a story about searching for meaning and a sense of self within sound</p>

Extract

How motherhood changes the way women listen

<p>The matriarch herself: Tina Knowles </p>

The Reading List

Tina Knowles’ memoir isn’t filled with Beyoncé gossip – to its credit

<p>The Great Business Generator: Over the last 100 years, F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has spawned adaptations, commercial ventures, and spin-offs</p>

The Reading List

Great Gatsby escape rooms? 100 years on, we’ve lost the book’s meaning

<p>The Big Three: Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945</p>

Tim Bouverie recalls The Big Three’s fall-out with wit and sensitivity

<p>Highlights for April include books on ‘Doctor Who’, vanishing nature and the authentic self</p>

Books of the Month

What to read in April, from a candid Doctor Who biography to five-star fiction

<p>Not one to suffer fools gladly, Gore Vidal gained a reputation as a silver-tongued writer and pundit who had wit in spades</p>

The Reading List

The sad decline of Gore Vidal, acerbic writer and fearsome feuder

<p>Brothers in arms: At the heart of the Beatles was the fraught friendship between Paul McCartney and John Lennon</p>

Interview

Ian Leslie on John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s ‘erotic’ bromance

<p>Man about town: As editor of New York’s most influential magazines, Graydon Carter was someone to know</p>

The Reading List

Vanity Fair’s lavish era is enough to make journalists today depressed

<p>Home sweet home: fiction authors recently have found inspiration in the hellscape of London’s rental crisis</p>

The Reading List

This book brings the grim horrors of London’s rental market to life

Reviews

<p>‘Source Code’ is the first of a memoir trilogy, looking back on Bill Gates’s early years in Seattle to the 1975 foundation of Microsoft</p>

Amid cyborg tech tycoons, Bill Gates’s memoir offers a more human view

<p>Readers’ history: Orlando Reade’s new book explores the response to ‘Paradise Lost’ over the centuries </p>

The book unearthing the subversive history of Paradise Lost

<p>Compelling: Dalrymple highlights India’s ‘often forgotten position’ as a motor of global trade in ancient and early medieval times </p>

The history book that will transform your view of early civilisation

<p>The admission of ‘goofs’ is about as near as Johnson gets to self-discovery </p>

Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed is twisted, sour and full of lies

Lists

<p>Must-reads: the books you can’t miss in 2025 </p>

The books to read in 2025, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Adam Kay

<p>Thriller: Meghann Fahy is part of ‘The Perfect Couple’s starry cast </p>

Love The Perfect Couple? These are the books and TV shows to try next

<p>With the rise of Instagram and BookTok, the importance of aesthetics in literature is on the rise </p>

Don’t judge a book by its cover: 15 of the most iconic book covers

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