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Witches, Nazi collaborators and banned books: International Booker prize announces 2026 longlist

Thirteen books make this year’s longlist for translated fiction, which awards a first prize of £50,000

Olga Ravn, Daniel Kehlmann, Ia Genberg, Mathias Énard and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara are among those longlisted for the 10th International Booker prize, which recognises the best translated fiction published in the past year.

A “Booker dozen” of 13 books were longlisted for this year’s prize. One author-translator pair will win £50,000, to be split equally.

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Nonesuch by Francis Spufford review – a dazzling wartime fantasy

Dark magic, fascism and romance in blitz-stricken London: this exuberant novel is a popcorny delight

When I teach creative writing, I often find myself insisting upon the essential importance of fun: that while the process of writing can and should be challenging, there’s no benefit to be had in martyrdom, and actually a level of relish is neither an indulgence or a distraction, but pretty compelling evidence of an author having found her proper form and subject. It’s what keeps you coming back. If you aren’t bent gigglingly over your manuscript, like a stock photo model alone with her salad, then what’s the point of any of it? There’s a stable of classics I draw on to evidence this claim, great novels where a big part of the appeal is feeling as though you’ve stumbled into a very interesting person’s exact idea of a very good time: Woolf’s Orlando, Nabokov’s Pnin, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, The Pisces by Melissa Broder. A lot of Austen, but maybe most of all Emma. And from now on, I’ll be adding Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch to the list.

His fourth work of fiction in a genre-spanning oeuvre, Nonesuch is a historical fantasy set during the second world war, every paragraph of which is packed with authorial zest. The novel opens in London, August 1939: war has been declared, but hasn’t yet made its reality felt in the city’s streets, and Iris Hawkins, an ambitious office clerk, makes her way through the sun-baked West End in a slinky dress. One half of a disastrous date later, she’s being whisked away to a DIY surrealist film club in bohemian Bloomsbury – not her scene at all – and two extremely fateful introductions: the first to Geoffrey Hale, a sweetly apprehensive BBC television engineer; and the second to the object of Geoffrey’s guileless infatuation, one Lady Lalage Cunningham, an icy aristocratic beauty with amazing hair and worrisome political sympathies. Cue chaos. Nonesuch follows the bolshy Iris from her seedy summer’s night through a regrettable Hampstead hook-up, and, eventually, neck-deep into a time-travelling plot by “magical fascist lunatics” to assassinate Winston Churchill. The novel is a pleasing pasticcio of romance, occultism, non-Euclidean geometry and airborne adventure across the blitz-stricken rooftops of London. It is difficult to imagine it would hold together quite so well in other hands than Spufford’s.

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Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore review – power to the people

Can a radical proposal to get rid of career politicians really be implemented?

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

If you think this idea sounds intriguing and refreshing, you might love Politics Without Politicians, Hélène Landemore’s argument for radically extending citizen power. If you think it sounds like maddening whimsy, ill-suited to the seriousness of the times we are living through – well, we’ll come to that later. But first, to the argument that politics is so broken as to be beyond repair, and that scrapping electoral representation is the best way of fixing it.

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Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness?

It’s tempting to dismiss the proliferation of labels as a fad, but there’s more to this phenomenon than a simple culture-war reading allows

My psychological research rarely makes good comedy material, but in a standup show in London recently, those two worlds collided. One of the jokes was about how everyone is getting diagnosed with ADHD these days – about the social media videos that encourage viewers to identify common human experiences, like daydreaming or talking a lot, as evidence of the condition. The audience laughed because everyone got it – they’ve all witnessed how common it seems to have become in the last few years. When something becomes this prevalent in society, and this mystifying, it’s no surprise it ends up as a punchline.

Part of my work as an academic involves trying to solve the puzzle of why so many more people, especially young people, are reporting symptoms of mental illness compared to even five or 10 years ago. (ADHD is a form of neurodivergence, rather than a mental illness, but both have seen an increase, so they are related questions.) Whenever I talk about this – to colleagues, school staff, parents – it doesn’t take long until someone brings up that judgment-laden, hot-button word: overdiagnosis.

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Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy

I have made the leap from literary fiction to fantasy – for those who think it’s mere wish-fulfilment, here’s why we need that thing with the dragons

Fantasy doesn’t need defending. It is one of the great cultural forms at the moment, all-pervading, ubiquitous. Maybe even the dominant form of writing just now, in line with the bookseller’s joke that contemporary publishing divides into A: romantasy and B: everything else.

But it might need explaining a little bit, for those who don’t get its pleasures; who still see it as wish-fulfilment, or as a low form that literary fiction gets to look down upon or direct a puzzled tolerance towards. As a writer of literary fiction who has borrowed and rejoiced in fantasy tropes for years, and has now himself written an out-and-out fantasy, I’m beyond embarrassment. I’ve been reading and loving fantasy all my life, and for me its best creators stand comfortably alongside the greats of any genre. And yet, I’m still encountering a faint sense that there is something to be accounted for in writing fantasy. That I ought to have reasons for wanting to do that thing with the dragons, no matter how culturally pervasive it is.

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‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?

BookTok influencer Jack Edwards motivates himself with reading goals – and he’s not alone. Authors and avid readers discuss the rise of metrics, and reveal how many books they finished last year

Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates for tracking pages and percentages are downloaded, friends publicly pledge to “do better” than they did last year. What was once a private pastime is announced, quantified and, in some corners of the internet, judged.

The appeal is obvious: in a distracted age, reading can easily become crowded out by work, screens and fatigue. Literacy rates in the UK are stagnating: in 2024, around 50% of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

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Georgi Gospodinov: ‘Jorge Luis Borges gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom’

The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann

My earliest reading memory
I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die.

My favourite book growing up
I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy.

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Another World by Melvyn Bragg review – portrait of the broadcaster as a young man

Leaving behind Cumbria for Oxford in the late 1950s, Bragg navigates class and culture in a world on the brink of change

It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.

Oxford to Bragg seems “more a theatre than a city, a spectacle rather than a habitation”. After his prelims, the weeding-out exams in his second term, he is left alone until his finals. He discovers Ingmar Bergman and has many earnest pub conversations about whether Pasternak will get the Nobel prize, or jazz is superior to rock’n’roll. He goes on the Aldermaston march and joins the anti-apartheid movement – although in hindsight he sees this as inspired by a residual faith in empire, with South Africa as Britain’s moral responsibility. Even after Suez, he owns a pencil sharpener in the shape of a globe on which the empire is “a continuous governing blur of pink”.

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Old Songs by Amy Jeffs and Gwen Burns review – ancient tales of murder, maidens and magic

These interconnected short stories of love and death, inspired by traditional ballads from the British Isles, are narrated with immediacy and warmth

In the old Scottish ballad, Tam Lin, a girl named Janet is warned by her family not to go near the well at Carterhaugh. There lurks an elfin knight who will take the virginity of any golden-haired maiden who passes through. The next day Janet, who is possessed of golden hair and a rebellious spirit, sets off for Carterhaugh. At the well, she picks a double rose which summons Tam Lin. Janet visits him daily and she learns how he was stolen by the Fairy Queen who cursed him to remain in Elfland as her vassal. Months later she realises she is with child. Refusing to forsake her lover, she hatches a bold and dangerous plan to free him from the curse.

This is just one of the ancient tales featured in Old Songs, a treasure trove of short stories inspired by traditional ballads from the British Isles. Stretching from the Classical period and the early 20th century, these richly imagined stories feature sibling murder, infanticide, kidnapping, abandonment and a man who is turned into a worm by a witch. “Not all the stories are happy and that is the way of the world,” notes author Amy Jeffs in the foreword.

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The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara review – into Tibet’s ‘Forbidden Kingdom’

The follow-up to Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line explores the history of colonial exploration through a perilous 19th-century odyssey

With her peripatetic and philosophical second novel, Deepa Anappara travels into uncharted territory. Her dazzling 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was part caper and part social satire, set in an Indian shantytown. In The Last of Earth, she points her writerly compass towards the mountains of mid-19th-century Tibet – a region then closed off to European imperialists – to meditate on the chequered history of colonial exploration, cartography and the impermanence of human existence.

“It’s in the nature of white men to believe they own the world, that no door should be shut to them.” For years, the British train, coax and bribe Indians to cross over, conducting surveying expeditions on their behalf; they also venture into the “Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet” in thinly veiled disguises. Intricately researched and meticulously plotted, this immersive novel is told through the alternating perspectives of two protagonists. Balram is an Indian schoolteacher and surveyor-spy who plays guide to an English captain, clumsily dressed as a monk and intent on being the first man to personally chart the route of the revered river Tsangpo and discover where it meets the sea. Meanwhile Katherine, of part Indian heritage, is on a mission to become the first European woman to reach Lhasa and set eyes on the Potala Palace after being denied membership of the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London.

The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara is published by Oneworld (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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