Category Culture

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray review – friends, lovers or something in between?

From classmates to co-parents, the changing dynamics of a female friendship are astutely observed in a novel that explores the boundaries between love, lust and companionship

Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dot was a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated, life-changing relationship between two women.

Nell and Eve meet aged 12 at a girls’ school in Sydney. Gray’s narrative moves smoothly back and forth from the 00s to the present day; as in David Nicholls’s One Day, we learn about our protagonists by meeting them at different moments in their lives, from the pressures of high school to the alcohol-soaked freedoms of university to the frustrations and joys of early parenthood.

Continue reading...

​’How do you really tell the truth about this moment?’: George Saunders on ghosts, mortality and Trump’s America

The Lincoln in the Bardo author is back with another metaphysical tale. He discusses Buddhism, partisan politics and the terrifying flight that changed his life

Like his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker prize in 2017, George Saunders’s new novel is a ghost story. In Vigil, an oil tycoon who spent a lifetime covering up the scientific evidence for climate change is visited on his deathbed by a host of spirits, who force him to grapple with his legacy. What draws Saunders to ghost stories? “If I had us talking here in a story and I allowed a ghost in from the 1940s, I might be more interested in it. It might be because they are in fact here,” he says, gesturing to the hotel lobby around us. “Or even if it’s not ghosts, we both have memories of people we love who have passed. They are here, in a neurologically very active way.” A ghost story can feel more “truthful”, he adds: “If you were really trying to tell the truth about this moment, would you so confidently narrow it to just today?”

Ghosts also invite us to confront our mortality and, in so doing, force a new perspective on life: what remains once you strip away the meaningless, day-to-day distractions in which we tend to lose ourselves? “Death, to me, has always been a hot topic,” Saunders says. “It’s so unbelievable that it will happen to us, too. And I suppose as you get older it becomes more …” he puts on a goofy voice: “interesting”. He is 67, grizzled and avuncular, surprisingly softly spoken for a writer who talks so loudly – and with such freewheeling, wisecracking energy – on the page. He says death is close to becoming a “preoccupation” for him and he worries that he is not prepared for it.

Continue reading...

Off the Scales by Aimee Donnellan review – inside the Ozempic revolution

A fascinating deep dive into the discovery, use and implications of a revolutionary new treatment

Few aspects of being human have generated more judgment, scorn and condemnation than a person’s size, shape and weight – particularly if you happen to be female. As late as 2022, the Times’s columnist Matthew Parris published a column headlined “Fat shaming is the only way to beat the obesity crisis” in which he attributed Britain’s “losing battle with fat” to society’s failure to goad and stigmatise the overweight into finally, shamefacedly, eating less. The tendency to equate excess weight with poor character (and thinness with grit and self-control) treats obesity as a moral as well as physical failing – less a disease than a lifestyle choice.

One of the great strengths of Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan’s first book is its insistence on framing the discovery of the new weight-loss drugs within the fraught social and cultural context of beauty norms, body image and health. For those who need them, weekly injections of Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro can be revolutionary. Yet for every person with diabetes or obesity taking the drugs to improve their health, others – neither obese nor diabetic – are obtaining them to get “beach-body” ready, fit into smaller dresses, or attain the slender aesthetic social media demands of them. Small wonder some commentators have likened the injections to “an eating disorder in a pen”.

Continue reading...

I’m a crime writer. Here’s why we make the best Traitors contestants

Barrister turned novelist Harriet Tyce is playing a blinder in the fourth series of the show. As a thriller writer myself, I recognise the traits that make her such a formidable Faithful

This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The producers of The Traitors were recruiting contestants for 2026, and wanted one of us to take part. Of course they did! The Traitors is a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of the golden age country house whodunnit, which is itself a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of real-life murder. It is crime writers’ job to examine the dark side of human behaviour. Betrayal of trust and manipulation are all in a day’s work. We often write from multiple perspectives, identifying with victim, perp and detective, giving us a unique kind of empathy. We spent the rest of the year wondering who it would be. (I didn’t get the call.)

Last November, in that howling no man’s land between the finale of Celebrity Traitors and the transmission of series four, I went along with 13 fellow crime novelists to the Traitors Live Experience in Covent Garden. Despite being professional pattern-finders with highly tuned powers of observation, none of us at the replica round table guessed that the Chosen One was among us, and had already completed her stint on the real thing.

Continue reading...

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy – the follow-up to I’m Glad My Mom Died

Family trauma shapes a student’s affair with her teacher in this bleak and funny fiction debut from the American memoirist

When it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation. I’m Glad My Mom Died introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder into a world eager to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. McCurdy had also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother had contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, walking readers through the realities of generational trauma; a step change for the former Disney child star who had been “the funny one” on obnoxious Nickelodeon kids’ shows.

In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.

Continue reading...

Nero book awards: Benjamin Wood and Sarah Perry among prize winners

Wood wins the award for fiction for his ‘utterly immersive’ novel Seascraper while Perry picks up the nonfiction prize for her memoir Death of an Ordinary Man

Booker-longlisted author Benjamin Wood has won this year’s Nero book award for fiction for his novel Seascraper.

Meanwhile, Claire Lynch won the debut fiction category for A Family Matter, and Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man took the nonfiction prize. Jamila Gavin was awarded the children’s fiction prize for My Soul, A Shining Tree.

Continue reading...

Leah Williamson and Richard Osman back National Year of Reading

The footballer and author are supporting a nationwide campaign, Go All In, which aims to reverse the ‘worrying decline’ in reading for pleasure among children in the UK

Leah Williamson, Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson and Richard Osman are among those who have thrown their weight behind a new nationwide push to get people reading for pleasure, as the government and the National Literacy Trust launch the National Year of Reading.

The year-long campaign, called Go All In, aims to reverse what organisers describe as a “worrying decline” in reading enjoyment among children and young people. Just one in three 8- to 18-year-olds now say they enjoy reading in their spare time. Only 26% of boys read for pleasure, compared to 39% of girls. More than a quarter of children are leaving primary school having not reached the reading age of an 11-year-old.

Continue reading...

Love Machines by James Muldoon review – the risks and rewards of getting intimate with AI

The sociology professor is suitably comfortable with AI helpers that he creates his own – it’s their inventors’ motives and unregulated environment he argues we should be concerned about

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

Continue reading...

Love Machines by James Muldoon review – inside the uncanny world of AI relationships

A sociologist talks to the people putting their faith – and their hearts – in the hands of robots

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

Continue reading...

Heated Rivalry books sell out amid Australian fans’ infatuation with gay ice hockey TV show

Wild success of television series drives huge demand for Game Changers novels, with Australian booksellers reporting significant customer orders

A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.

Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.

Continue reading...