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Don’t argue with strangers… and 11 more rules to survive the information crisis

Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm

We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.

The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.

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The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.

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Future Boy by Michael J Fox review – secrets from the set of a definitive 80s movie

The actor’s account of his big Hollywood break – and how it almost never happened

Michael J Fox has already eked out four books of Hollywood memoir, so the justification for a fifth – written with longtime collaborator Nelle Fortenberry – ought to be good. It is: the subject of these 176 pages is a three-month period in 1985 when Fox was simultaneously shooting his breakout sitcom role in Family Ties and the career-defining American classic, Back to the Future.

That’s two more-than-full-time jobs for one little guy, necessitating that the then 23-year-old actor work 20-hour days, six days a week. This schedule was only possible because the mid-1980s was a time before showbiz labour laws caught up with basic human decency. These days, we’re told, a standard contract “demands two weeks of buffer time on either side of a job”, while Fox didn’t even get an hour.

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Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse review – the women who helped change the world

The bestselling author champions female trailblazers in an enjoyable anthology for all ages

Women make up roughly 50% of the population but only feature in about 0.5% of recorded history. In Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, Kate Mosse, the bestselling author of Labyrinth, celebrates can-do women and gives history’s trailblazers their due. Aimed at teenage readers but just as enjoyable for adults, this anthology comprises bite-sized stories of female achievement and the centuries-old fight for equality. As Mosse notes in the introduction, it is about women “who refused to accept the limitations put on them, who campaigned and marched, battled and challenged the status quo to change the world for the better”.

The book features a mixture of famous and lesser-known figures: artists, writers, scientists, academics, sportswomen, educators and politicians. There’s primatologist Dian Fossey; avant garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil; Britain’s first black headteacher Beryl Gilroy; Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai; Ethiopian politician and humanitarian Senedu Gebru; racehorse trainer Florence Nagle; computer programmers Ada Lovelace and Dorothy Vaughan; and actor and music hall star Josephine Baker, who was also a pilot and agent in the French resistance during the second world war. Not all the assembled achievers are straightforwardly heroic – Marie Stopes may have founded Britain’s first ever birth control clinic in 1921, but she also believed in eugenics.

Available via Pan Macmillan, 10hr 16min

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King Sorrow by Joe Hill review – dragon-fired horror epic is a tour de force

This sprawling tale of college kids who summon evil with lifelong consequences is a fantastic read

Six oddball but doughty kids fall into the path of a vast and terrible supernatural evil which has come into our world from the outer limits of darkness. They must spend their lifetimes battling it, facing horror after horror in the process.

This is the plot, roughly, of Stephen King’s novel It (his best; no arguments). It is also the plot, roughly, of King’s son Joe Hill’s new horror doorstopper, in which six friends summon the ancient, infinitely malicious dragon King Sorrow from the Long Dark to help them defeat some baddies. Needless to say, their supernatural ritual backfires.

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We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins review – a legend with a temper

The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody mindedness and belligerence

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle.

FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.

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‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winner

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year’s Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.

Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) is often described as “Hungarian-British”, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. “I’m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.

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Vaim by Jon Fosse review – the Nobel laureate performs a strange miracle

In the Norwegian master’s latest example of ‘mystical realism’, one man makes a dreamlike, hypnotic voyage through life

“I have always known that writing can save lives,” said the Norwegian author Jon Fosse in his speech accepting the 2023 Nobel prize in literature. “And if my writing also can help to save the lives of others, nothing would make me happier.” Rare is the novelist who talks in such language these days: fiction tends to know its modest place. Fosse, who is also a poet and an essayist, and one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, follows his own path. A case in point: Septology (2019-2021), published across three volumes, running to more than 800 pages, containing a single sentence. Forget formalism, though; his fictions, often set in fjordic Norway, are disintegration loops, quiet and incantatory, emotionally overwhelming.

At fewer than 120 pages, Vaim, his first new work since winning the Nobel, is a wisp of a thing. Divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, it begins with Jatgeir sailing on a small boat from the small town of Vaim to the big city of Bjørgvin. His mission is to buy a needle and thread to fix a missing button. It’s a long journey and, not just at one shop but at two, he gets royally ripped off, being charged far over the odds for a single spool. He huffs and seethes, but says nothing to the storekeepers themselves. What a hick, we might think. What a chump.

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The risky strategy of Booker winner Flesh pays off

The protagonist’s inner life is hidden from the reader in this highly original novel

Reflecting on the Booker judging process, chair Roddy Doyle stressed the “singularity” of Flesh, the most unusual novel on the shortlist. In his sixth book, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay takes a classic story arc – one man’s journey through life, from childhood to old age – and presents it in a radically new and challenging way, scooping out the interiority that usually powers the novel form.

We meet his protagonist, István, as a bored 15-year-old in a Hungarian backwater. He is seduced by a middle-aged neighbour into a relationship suffused with shame and disgust; a confused act of violence knocks his life off course; he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait; he moves to London and works as a bouncer before the rising tides of global capital carry him, for a while, into the monied elite. And all the while, we are cut off from his thoughts, emotions and motivations: we see only how others react to him, desire him, fear him. The most we tend to hear from István himself is a bland, noncommittal “OK”.

Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Andrew Miller is bookies’ favourite to win 2025 Booker prize

The Land in Winter has shortest odds of victory, ahead of Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Andrew Miller is the bookmakers’ favourite to win the 2025 Booker prize, which will be announced on Monday evening in London.

The English author tops the William Hill odds at 6/4 for The Land in Winter, a novel set in 1960s England which follows two marriages struggling under the weight of postwar class divisions, professional dislocation and emotional estrangement. Miller was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2001 for his novel Oxygen.

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