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Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt review – life after Paul Auster

What’s it like to lose your partner of more than 40 years? The novelist and essayist reflects on going from ‘we’ to ‘I’

It wasn’t quite Beatlemania, but, at the height of Paul Auster’s fame in the 1980s and 90s, screaming fans clambered on to the hood of a car after a reading in Buenos Aires. Admirers mobbed him at bookshop events in Paris, the city where he had once eked out a living translating French literature. He was offered big money to make ads promoting American beef to Japan. He was hailed as a rock god, a literary superstar, a postmodernist with leading-man looks.

Little of this is of much consequence or consolation to novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt who, before he died of cancer in 2024, had been married to Auster for more than 40 years. As she tells it in Ghost Stories, her memoir of their life together, she was a tall blond PhD student in a jumpsuit when she met him – “a beautiful man in a black leather jacket” – at a poetry reading. He was separated from the mother of his child, living alone in a gloomy Brooklyn apartment, yet to publish anything of substance. Literature bound them: he was just 15 when he decided his future was in writing; she had come to the same insight at an even younger age.

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‘Deliciously dark’: how Freida McFadden’s twisty thrillers gripped millions of readers

The author, who recently revealed her real name to be Sara Cohen, began writing to escape from her work as a medic, and now has a huge global fanbase

Some call themselves McFans, others Freida readahs. However Freida McFadden’s loyal fans choose to define themselves, what we know for sure is that their numbers are growing, and fast.

McFadden, the author behind blockbuster psychological thriller The Housemaid, was the UK’s bestselling novelist of 2025, outstripping Richard Osman, Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros, and shifting 2.6m print copies in 12 months.

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From Manifesto to Mr Loverman: Bernardine Evaristo’s best books – ranked!

From the secret gay life of a British-Caribbean man to that controversial shared Booker win, the author has blazed a trail across the literary landscape. Here are seven of her top titles

Even by Evaristo’s experimental standards, this book is a highly ambitious mash-up of forms and stories. It takes a mismatched couple, strait-laced Stanley and ebullient Jessie, on a road trip across Europe where they meet the ghosts of black historical figures, from Alexander Pushkin to Mary Seacole. We learn a lot along the way, but the real engine of the story is Stanley and Jessie’s combative relationship. Told in a blend of prose, poetry, scripts, memos, legal documents, budget spreadsheets … and road signs, Soul Tourists ultimately wobbles under the weight of both its own good intentions and its skittish variety, but it has charm and energy to burn.

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Son of Nobody by Yann Martel review – Life of Pi author discovers a long-lost poem from Troy

An epic poem about the Trojan war is merged with the domestic heartbreak of the scholar who discovers it in this ambitious, structurally problematic novel

In Yann Martel’s fifth novel, a Canadian classicist, Harlow Donne, has been offered a year’s fellowship at Oxford University. His wife, Gail, has a full-time managerial job, and they have a seven-year-old daughter, Helen. Who will pour out her breakfast cereal and pick her up from school while Harlow is away? He and Gail quarrel. He leaves for England, and as she sees him off Gail whispers in his ear: “Don’t come back.”

So far, so everyday: but once Harlow gets to Oxford, the narrative shifts its form and becomes odder and more interesting. His prescribed task is to help sift through and translate a hoard of ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus, in upper Egypt. It’s tedious work. Soon, though, Harlow is piecing together from words or half-words on wisps of desiccated reeds what he believes to be a long-lost epic poem. It relates the story of the Trojan war, but not, as Homer tells it, from the viewpoint of princely warriors and gods. The protagonist is a common soldier, a “son of nobody” named Psoas.

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How to train your brain to see possibility instead of doom

Our minds evolved to minimise unpredictability. But if we learn to live with doubt, a world of opportunities opens up

It can feel as though the world is tilting towards chaos: political shocks, economic instability, technological upheaval and a constant stream of bad news. Faced with so much uncertainty, many of us default to a sense of impending doom. But is that reaction hardwired – or can we train ourselves to keep a more open mind?

A useful starting point is humility. Every generation, it seems, believes it inhabits uniquely turbulent times, as literary epics down the ages testify. Uncertainty has always been part of the human condition, and none of us can really know what tomorrow holds.

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‘After all the horrible things we’ve been through,’ he said to me, ‘if I die of cancer, it will make a bad story’: Siri Hustvedt on losing Paul Auster

First there was the double tragedy that tore the family apart – then came a deadly diagnosis. The writer reflects on life after the death of her novelist husband

I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead. He died on 30 April 2024, at 6.58pm here in the Brooklyn house where I am now writing these words. He was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer in January 2023. But before that, in early November 2022, Paul had a CT scan in the emergency room at Mount Sinai West hospital. The radiologist spotted a mass in his right lung and noted it might be cancer.

We all die, but only some of us know our lives could end soon. Although I had often thought about what it would mean to live without Paul, I began to imagine it more often. I imagined walking around the house alone. I imagined grieving. If your father dies, I said to our daughter, Sophie, I will lose my every day.

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My Phantoms author Gwendoline Riley on winning $175,000: ‘It was unimaginable. I felt overwhelmed.’

Renowned for her darkly funny novels exploring failed relationships, the writer has been awarded the Windham‑Campbell prize for a body of work. She explains why it will change her life – if not her outlook

It’s possible that she might be feeling more tolerant of straitened circumstances because her work has just received significant critical – and material – recognition in the shape of a Windham-Campbell prize. These awards are the antithesis of many other hoopla-heavy literary prizes: each year, eight writers across fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry are given $175,000 (£135,000) to allow them to work with financial ease and security; previous winners include Anne Enright, Margo Jefferson and Yiyun Li. An anonymous jury selects the recipients from a pool of nominations – nominators and their choices also remain undisclosed, with the criteria being excellence across a body of work – and, aside from a select number of events, there’s little of the media circus about the whole affair. They are, quite simply, a boon to writers without obvious additional means, who are all operating in an increasingly challenging marketplace.

What did it feel like to be selected? “Unimaginable. It was just an ordinary, wet Wednesday, and I had an email through. I hadn’t heard of it, but then I did remember seeing Anne Enright getting it, because I remember some of the language she used to describe what it was like to get exactly this kind of call. And then I came up with the phrase ‘Deus Ex Cashmachina’, which I think would work better on the page than when you say it out loud. And then I felt completely overwhelmed. I think they filmed me crying.”

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Kae Tempest on creativity and his gender transition: ‘I’m just glad to be alive’

Ten years after his debut novel, the poet and musician has written a follow-up exploring self-discovery and a life lived on the edge. He talks about sexuality, pronouns and drawing strength from the literature he loves

Kae Tempest sidles into a pub near his house on a weekday afternoon and orders a pint of mineral water. At his side is Murphy, an enormous, 14-year-old alaskan malamute dog with startling blue eyes who settles down on the floor next to his master and goes to sleep. “He’s all right,” Tempest says. “He’s very friendly. He won’t even put his nose up.” The rapper, performance poet, playwright and novelist has a ginger beard and is wearing Timberland boots, baggy jeans and a black hoodie over a blue-and-white striped collared shirt. His hair is hidden by a cap. Years ago, his dramatic russet hair was long, but he cropped it when he dropped the “T” from his first name and came out as nonbinary, a watershed moment in his gender transition. Now testosterone has deepened his voice and his journey has reached its final stage – from they/them to he/him.

As Tempest has been famous since his late 20s, showered with accolades ranging from Mercury nominations for two of his albums (including his debut, Let Them Eat Chaos) to becoming the youngest poet ever to receive the Ted Hughes award for the epic performance poem Brand New Ancients, this odyssey has taken place in public. On his song I Stand on the Line, from his last album Self Titled, Tempest vividly describes the anxiety of having to deal with the hostility of some people’s reactions to his “second puberty” (“Out in the limelight like, please, nobody look at me / I’m looking for myself, all I’m seeing is the bitterness / Coming my way when I’m using the facilities”). So is it a heavy burden to be such a visible trans person? “It’s just my life,” Tempest replies, his voice a soft south London growl, much quieter than the thrilling, declamatory style of his performances. “I’m just glad to be alive. How beautiful,” he adds. “Because you felt like you might not be at some point.”

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The Dog’s Gaze by Thomas Laqueur review – the art of the canine, from Velázquez to Picasso

A clever and beautiful survey of dogs in painting, with a brilliant interpretation of their role at its heart

Thirty-five thousand years ago, in the Ardèche region of France, Paleolithic artists drew a spectacular bestiary on the walls of the Chauvet cave. Their focus was apex predators, so there were lots of lions, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Dogs were nowhere to be seen, and yet in the soft sediment on the limestone floor of the cave, there are traces of canid pawprints next to human footprints. Two fellow creatures, most likely a boy and a dog, stood together, about 10,000 years after the art was made, looking up at the walls in wonder. Here was a moment of shared contemplation, followed perhaps by a glance to see the other’s reaction.

In this luminous book, the American cultural historian Thomas Laqueur explores what he calls “the dog’s gaze”. The dog was the first animal to live companionably with humans, and Laqueur argues that this marks the boundary between nature and culture. It is this threshold status that has, in turn, qualified the dog to play a rich, symbolic part in western art. Just having dogs in a picture – snuffling for picnic crumbs in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte or trooping home in Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow – becomes a way for an artist to pack an image with extra resonance and second-order meaning.

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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke review – the downfall of an all‑American tradwife

The premise – Instagram influencer is confronted by pioneer reality – is genius. But does this high-concept debut live up to the hype?

Could Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear be the first great tradwife novel? This was my hope: finally, a literary response to the unhinged social trend of women cosplaying “traditional Christian values” – pronatalism and obeying one’s husband – to large social media followings. I am not immune to hype, and Yesteryear has been hyped to high heaven, prompting massive auctions for the rights, and landing a film deal with Anne Hathaway.

You have to admit that the premise – Instagram tradwife wakes up in what appear to be the actual pioneer days, and finds that traditional wifedom is not as much of a hoot as her whitewashed social media re-enactment had implied – is genius. As one of the “Angry Women” our heroine Natalie so disparages, I was looking forward to some sweet schadenfreude.

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