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Saba Sams: ‘I’ve no interest in reading Wuthering Heights again’

The Send Nudes author on rereading Lorrie Moore, finding Dodie Smith at the right time, and the enduring brilliance of Muriel Spark

My earliest reading memory
I remember reading Jacqueline Wilson aloud to my mum in the car. I think it was The Illustrated Mum. My mum couldn’t believe it was a children’s book, and I felt so proud. I always found most children’s books overly virtuous and safe, but Wilson’s never were. I love her for that.

My favourite book growing up
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I read it again recently, having mostly forgotten it, and loved it just as much. It’s totally alive.

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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley audiobook review – a topical time-hopping romance

Actor Katie Leung narrates this genre-bending debut in which an Victorian Arctic explorer is catapulted into our brave new world

The Ministry of Time opens in the middle of a job interview. The applicant, a nameless British Cambodian civil servant, is in line for a role that involves working with expats of “high-interest status and particular needs”. When she asks where these expats come from, she is told: “History.” The interviewer adds, casually, “We have time travel.”

Listeners concerned about the practicalities of this time-hopping tale will be reassured by our protagonist’s observation that contemplating the physics leads to a “crock of shit”, so it is best not dwelled upon. “All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.” Her job, then, is to act as minder or “bridge” to individuals removed from their eras and bounced into the present.

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Tales of the Suburbs by John Grindrod review – an entertaining alternative history of queer Britain

From London’s commuter belt to the country village gay club, these portraits of LGBTQ+ life are filled with humour, compassion and observational flair

Generations of readers have loved Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. His chronicle of queer life began in 1976 in the eclectic glamour of San Francisco’s Barbary Lane, where queer people learned who they were and how to live their lives. But even Maupin relocated in the end. The most recent instalment, Mona of the Manor, saw one of its key characters move to the Cotswolds to navigate a very different kind of village.

The social historian John Grindrod nods to Maupin in this fantastically entertaining alternative history of queer life in Britain, which departs from the usual tales of city-based freedom and discovery to tell the stories of people who grew up in the suburbs. “The suburbs” resist easy definition, and Grindrod handles this lightly. Sometimes they’re marked out by social class, sometimes by geography, each facet blurring into the other. His locations range from London’s commuter belt to hamlets, farms and towns, from the edges of Portsmouth and Hull to pockets of Glasgow and Wilmslow and a tiny village in Lincolnshire, where a gay builder is protected from homophobic abuse in the pub by the local darts team.

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Claire Lynch wins Nero Gold prize for debut about 1980s homophobia

The £30,000 award went to novel A Family Matter, about a lesbian affair and a custody battle

A debut novel exploring the long-term effects of prejudice and secrecy on a lesbian couple in the 1980s has won the Nero Gold prize.

Claire Lynch was presented with the £30,000 award for her book A Family Matter at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening.

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Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Sixteen novels are in contention for the £30,000 award, now in its 31st year, with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata

Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi, Kit de Waal and Lily King are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.

Awarded annually and now in its 31st year, the prize comes with £30,000, and is one of the most prominent accolades for women’s writing in the English language. The 16-strong list features a selection of novels that range in setting from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata, and from 1970s Birmingham to East Berlin on the brink of reunification.

To browse all books in the Women’s prize for fiction 2026 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self review – raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire

Thirty-five years on from his debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Self takes aim at London’s chattering classes in an excoriating vision of moral decline

In Will Self’s 1991 debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, an art therapist named Misha Gurney finds himself involuntarily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital where he is employed. In the title story, Misha’s father is revealed as a friend and early associate of the hospital’s chief psychiatrist Zack Busner, a recurring character in Self’s fiction until the present day.

In his first incarnation, Busner is engaged in testing the titular theory, by whose metric “the surface of the collective psyche was like the worn, stripy ticking of an old mattress. If you punched into its coiled hide at any point, another part would spring up – there was no action without reaction, no laughter without tears, no normality without its pissing accompanist.”

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The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer review – the rise and reign of Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola

An epic account of how three demigod directors, in pursuit of indie freedom, redefined American film-making

Here we are once more: back to the glory days of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system in the 1960s and 70s. Our cast is filled with brilliant hotshots and creative risk-takers, energised by the French New Wave, the American counterculture and the industry’s own amazing entrepreneurial past.

Peter Biskind’s breezy, bleary, cynical book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranged freely across the 1970s, with controversial anecdotes about egos and drugs (though maybe the definitive book about the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution had the witty idea of looking at the five films Oscar-nominated for best picture in the transitional year of 1968, from the supercool Bonnie and Clyde to the squaresville Dr Doolittle, to see what they told us about America’s cinematic mind at the time.

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The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain review – virtuoso portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s final year

Portraying the breakdown of the couple’s marriage through the eyes of the people around them, this deeply researched and utterly convincing debut is an astonishing achievement

Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then, their marriage in tatters, move away again. Instead of describing the couple directly we glimpse them through the eyes of the people around them, from the village doctor, their charlady and various neighbours, to friends, colleagues and visitors, offering the reader vignettes drawn from varying distances and perspectives. Although it is not mentioned in the book’s jacket copy, the couple in question are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; eight weeks after the period described in the novel, Plath, having returned to London, would take her own life.

During their time in Devon, from 1961–2, Plath completed The Bell Jar, gave birth to a son, Nicholas, at home, and wrote the poems that would be posthumously published as Ariel; Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill, which Plath quickly discovered. Given that the couple’s lives provide the source material for an entire cottage industry, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary. At points, the experience of reading it feels very close to time travel: Yes, you think, as you watch Plath sitting with her daughter Frieda on her lap in the garden, or having her thumb stitched up by the local GP, or glimpse her getting up to write at 4am: that is just how it must have been.

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Brave, visionary and queer: the Bohemian brilliance of author George Sand

With her radical politics and flamboyant affairs, Sand was no stranger to controversy, but it’s time to debunk the myths surrounding a writer ahead of her time

It would be hard to find a more courageous and perverse, iconic yet controversial figure in European literary history than George Sand. One of the great romantics, she helped transform culture, and her writing shifted social attitudes in ways we still benefit from. Victor Hugo called her “an immortal”; Gustave Flaubert, “one of the great figures of France”. Matthew Arnold said she was “the greatest spirit in our European world [since] Goethe”.

The 150th anniversary of her death this year is a chance to revisit her extraordinary achievements and legacy. But to do that we need to debunk some of the myths that surround this pioneering ecological, feminist and republican writer.

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Should you overshare more?

We may cringe at influencers and friends who let it all hang out, but research shows that keeping quiet might be worse

Do you recoil at oversharers on social media, or joke among your friends about “TMI”? I know I do. But while mocking public confession comes easy, it’s harder to appreciate the risks of normalising silence: withheld anxieties, unspoken family histories, and the little omissions that make workplaces and relationships brittle. The instinct to pour scorn on “attention seekers” may be masking a deeper public-health problem: chronic concealment.

For much of my career as an academic I made a living scolding people about privacy. I lectured on digital hygiene, warned audiences about the ways social media amplifies folly, and played the role of the wary scientist: don’t put your passwords in a document, don’t take quizzes that leak your intimate preferences, don’t broadcast things you can’t take back. I was a walking contradiction, though. Privately, I did online quizzes for fun. I kept a notepad of passwords on my desktop. I knew the rules and, like many of us, I broke them.

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