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Down on your luck? How behavioural neuroscience could help

The latest research suggests there’s far more to good fortune than mere accident

When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not their credentials, not their intelligence, not their experience. Luck. For years, this anecdote struck me as charmingly eccentric – the kind of thing a titan of industry gets away with saying because nobody around them dares to laugh. Then I began studying the neuroscience of fortunate people, and I stopped laughing, too.

What my research has revealed is that luck, far from being a roll of the cosmic dice, operates through identifiable patterns of brain chemistry and behaviour. The consistently lucky are not blessed by fate. They are running different neurological software – and the remarkable thing is that this software can be installed.

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‘I was in the pit of despair’: Non-speaking autistic novelist Woody Brown on his journey from write-off to writer

As a child, Brown was underestimated, infantilised and dismissed by specialists and teachers. Now 28, he has written an acclaimed debut novel set in an adult day care centre that gives people like him a voice

‘May I say that I’m very glad to meet you,”  Woody Brown taps on his word board. Brown is formal, funny and strikingly eloquent. He has a formidable ability to tell stories that reach into the mind of his characters and express what they are thinking, and what they think others are thinking about them. Brown is also autistic and non-speaking.

His first novel, Upward Bound, tells the story of everyday life at the eponymous adult day care centre in southern California. The title is ironic – the young adults, referred to as clients, are anything but upward bound. By and large, they are stifled, patronised, unheard and unseen. Despite their shortcomings, the staff are portrayed with a surprising tenderness.

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Benjamin Wood: ‘John Fowles’s The Magus was so frustrating I threw it at the wall’

The author on the Steinbeck novel that moved him to tears, how becoming a father inspired him to reread Marilynne Robinson, and the culinary comforts of James M Cain

My earliest reading memory
When I was eight, my mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. I grew up thinking he was the same Bob Wilson who played in goal for Arsenal and presented sport on ITV. That wasn’t true, but it has never dampened my appreciation of this brilliant rhyming picture book, which ought to be reissued to inspire more kids to read. My sons adore it.

My favourite book growing up
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck had a profound effect on me in secondary school. I was amazed by how vividly a writer could evoke a landscape in words. It was also the first novel that moved me to tears, and stories that can do that will always stay dear to me.

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No New York by Adele Bertei review – a vivid, vibrant musical coming of age

1970s and 80s New York are viscerally evoked in this potent memoir of the ‘no wave’ scene

You won’t necessarily have heard of Adele Bertei: she was a member of experimental jazz-punk band the Contortions from 1977 and recorded the pop-house single Build Me a Bridge. But her memoir is an essential slice of New York’s bohemian pizza pie, and works in part because she is a relative unknown, not weighed down by her own cultural baggage.

Following a troubled, itinerant upbringing, she arrives in Manhattan in 1977 to find a city on its knees. The big apple was in the red, both literally (fires were a regular occurrence) and monetarily (there was a municipal debt crisis). But pre-Aids and post-Warhol’s avant garde grip, it was also a place that was creatively open.

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Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob wins Waterstones children’s book prize

Huw Aaron’s tale of a green blob reading to its child takes overall prize, while Janeen Hayat wins in the young readers category and SF Williamson in the older readers

This year’s Waterstones children’s book prize winner features a green blob tucking its child – a smaller green blob – into bed.

Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob by Huw Aaron is narrated by the parent blob who, through the course of the book, tells the child blob about all the other creatures also getting ready to sleep, including a yeti, Medusa and a Minotaur.

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‘Effortlessly hip’: two novels named joint winners of Queen Mary small press fiction prize

Rebecca Gransden’s Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group and Nell Osborne’s Ghost Driver ‘crossed the line together’ to take award previously known as the Republic of Consciousness prize

Two experimental novels have jointly won the Queen Mary small press fiction prize, formerly known as the Republic of Consciousness prize.

Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden, published by Tangerine Press, and Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne, published by Moist Books, were announced as this year’s winners during a ceremony held at Queen Mary University, London, on Wednesday evening.

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The Two Roberts by Damian Barr audiobook review – love and lost dreams in bohemian London

This fictionalised account of the relationship between real-life artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun vividly depicts their romance and rise to fame – and the fall from grace that followed

The artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun first met in 1933 as talented young students at the Glasgow School of Art. From that moment on, these two working-class men from Ayrshire lived, worked and loved together at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Moving to London, they found fame in the art world, where they were nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso. Against a backdrop of war, they drank, partied, were photographed by Vogue and spent more money than they earned.

In his fictionalised biography, Damian Barr charts the relationship of this largely forgotten pair, which spanned 26 years, drawing on what is known about their lives and work, and using creative licence to fill in the gaps. We first meet them as students lying on a hillside above Glasgow, “curled like commas, naked in the nest they’ve rolled in the high golden grass”. The pair lodge in the attic of a wealthy widow, where they subsist on stew and form a protective barrier around themselves. They are, observes Barr, “as careful as scared people should be”.

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Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh review – high-concept adultery fable

Unfaithful lovers escape to an uncanny alternate world, in this compelling allegory for infidelity and desire

Sophie Mackintosh has established a reputation for speculative literary fiction about young women’s desires and suffering at the hands of men. Her new novel, Permanence, is less plainly political than earlier work, concerned more with allegories of desire than oppression.

The novel begins in an uncanny hotel, where Clara wakes beside her lover, Francis. Clara works desultorily in an art gallery and shares a flat with a friend. Francis is an academic, an art historian married to a lawyer, the father of a toddler, but on this day he and Clara find themselves in a parallel world in which adulterous couples live in what seems at first to be a permanent holiday. The realised fantasy is bourgeois, north European: a cobbled old city where the sun always shines and there are many restaurants with clean tablecloths and good wine. There are parks full of perpetually blooming flowers, old stone fountains; markets offering ripe tomatoes, olive oil and bread; scented soap in clean bathrooms, and nothing for Clara and Francis to do but make love, bathe, eat, drink and stroll the charming streets. Clara finds pretty dresses, girlish pale blue silk and yellow cotton, awaiting her in the wardrobe, her favourite books beside the bed.

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Poem about ‘relentlessness of the news cycle’ wins National Poetry Competition

Judges praised the ‘emotional stakes’ of Partridge Boswell’s poem The Gathering, which took the £5,000 top prize

A poem about language, love, and processing distressing world events has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition. The Gathering by Partridge Boswell was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries.

The poem came from Boswell’s attempt to make sense of global suffering, state violence and war. He describes how he “followed the media for a long while, writing elegies, parodies and rants” to make sense of his “discomfort and disbelief”, and the emotional burden this entails.

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First Queen’s reading medal goes to Black British book festival founder Selina Brown

The founder of Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature and champion of inclusive reading becomes Queen Camilla’s inaugural National Reading Hero

Selina Brown has been named the inaugural National Reading Hero recipient of the Queen’s Reading Room medal, a new literary award unveiled by Queen Camilla.

Brown, founder of the Black British book festival, will receive the honour in recognition of her work establishing Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature and bringing inclusive stories into primary schools in areas with low literacy rates.

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