Books
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The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele and David Perry review – the colourful side of the dark ages
The middle ages are a sort of paradox, write the authors of this engaging history. Peter Frankopan The Guardian “When…
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The Treaty by Gretchen Friemann review – the road to division in Ireland
At 3am on 3 December 1921, the mail steamer Cambria, on her maiden voyage between Holyhead and Kingstown, now Dún…
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Book Review: Country is an urgent call to learn from Indigenous knowledges to care for the land
This line sits towards the concluding paragraphs of Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, by Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian activist and…
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Holiday reading: Five picks from a great year for African writing
South Africa’s Damon Galgut lifted the Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Promise, and exciting prose continued to sprout.…
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Buying picture books as Christmas presents?
Gifting children books can be about more than just giving them something to read. Helen Joanne Adam The Conversation Books…
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Her Voice
A ground-breaking collection of personal stories from Greek women and their friends is published and available now. Her Voice, Greek…
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Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics: an extraordinary life in song
Despite its apparently unambiguous title, The Lyrics is not an exhaustive collection of the words to songs written or co-written…
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The big idea: are we really so polarised?
But emotion, not policies, may be what actually divides us. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel The Guardian In 2020,…
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Henry Kissinger’s Last Crusade: Stopping Dangerous AI
He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a…
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Booker Prize won by South African writer Damon Galgut for The Promise
The 57-year-old, who has been shortlisted twice previously, won the 50,000-pound ($91,783) prize against a shortlist that included Pulitzer Prize winner Richard…
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With Devotion, Hannah Kent gives us empathically drafted portraits of love in all its forms
Not long after, Burial Rites (2013) – a fictional account of the last public execution in Iceland in 1830 –…
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Guide to the classics: Euripides’ The Trojan Women – an unflinching look at the brutality of war
Extensive narratives of the war are told in the oral traditions of myth and literature, and they also appear very…
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How Humane Wars are Inhumane
Samuel Moyn’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War argues that efforts to make war more ethical have…
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The best new books to read in October as selected by avid readers and critics
Each month, we’ll present a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans and The Book…
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Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel prize in literature
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the…
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How Nadifa Mohamed became the first Somali person to be short-listed for the Booker Prize with new novel, The Fortune Men
She didn’t know at the time, the discovery would lead her to write what’s now become the first novel written…
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