This month’s best paperbacks: Haruki Murakami, Richard Powers and more
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from a must-read graphic history to a tale of lost love
Category Culture
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi review – love, war and betrayal
Troubled by a photo of her grandmother living it up in Mussolini’s Italy, the author of Free delves into archive and memory to uncover the truth
It starts with a photo. A black-and-white image of a couple relaxing on a pair of sun loungers in front of a luxury ski hotel: him, squinting against the sun; her, smiling at the camera, wrapped in a white fur coat. It is their honeymoon in Cortina, up in the Italian Alps.
The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi’s grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. “Morally degenerate” was one comment. “Fascist collaborator” another.
The Two Roberts by Damian Barr review – lost story of a gay art duo
The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined
What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.
Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless exercise of his talents offered his escape. He expanded his exploration of how brutality can take hold in his novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa. Now he returns to Scotland in this moving meditation on art, love and home.
A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries review – comfortably dumb?
From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many forms
Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.
In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith review – a terrific, tightly plotted romp
With four murder inquiries in play, JK Rowling’s eighth Cormoran Strike novel avoids the page-padding longeurs of previous volumes – but will he finally tell Robin how he feels about her?
In his popular BBC series Just One Thing, the late Michael Mosley made the case for resistance training. Lifting weights, he explained, not only builds stronger muscles, it also boosts the immune system, maintains a healthy heart and improves brain function. Best of all, it can be done in your kitchen, using ordinary domestic items: pints of milk in place of dumbbells, say, or squats wearing a backpack full of books.
Anyone intending to use Robert Galbraith’s Strike novels for this purpose would be advised to seek the advice of a GP. The Hallmarked Man may not be the heftiest of the eight so far – it does not even make it into the top three – but it still clocks in at a cool 912 pages. Galbraith’s tendency to whopperdom has in the past elicited a fair amount of griping from critics, me among them, who argued that judicious pruning would better serve her plots and her charismatic private detective duo, the sweary one-legged army veteran Cormoran Strike and his brave, decent business partner Robin Ellacott. Not that it changed anything. The books remained resolutely huge (as did sales – by 2024, a staggering 20 million books had been sold in over 50 countries). Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, has never been one to bow to her detractors.
Poem of the week: Solitude by Peter McDonald
A wounded bird becomes an image for much wider damage to our world
Solitude
Paraphrase on Saint-John Perse, Anabase IV
Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen review – a portrait of catastrophic mental illness
Originally published a year before her death, the Danish author’s final novel is an autofictional suicide note
Tove Ditlevsen’s last novel, Vilhelm’s Room, was originally published in Denmark in 1975. As it begins, the protagonist, Lise Mundus, has just been abandoned by Vilhelm, her husband of 20 years. He’s a celebrity newspaper editor; she’s an acclaimed writer with a history of addiction. From a bed in a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad: “Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage – aged 51, but youthful in spirit – wonderful son, aged 15 – household literary name – summerhouse – large flat in the city centre – temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown – prefers a motorist.”
The ad is seized upon by Lise’s malicious upstairs neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, who shows it to her young lodger/lover, Kurt, hoping he can financially exploit Lise. Kurt is duly installed in Lise’s home, but finds himself treated there with total indifference. Lise is wholly consumed with memories of Vilhelm and with plans to end her own life. We know she will carry these out; in the opening pages, she is already dead.
Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy review – brave and absorbing
In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother
Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC’s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: “In Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?” Ginsberg’s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: “It gave me a great sort of … tolerance for eccentric behaviour.”
Arundhati Roy, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight. Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this madness are as disparate as those of love, and these two aspects – the abnormal, the overbearing, and the protective, the nurturing – can be, in our mothers, intimately intertwined (“She was my shelter and my storm,” writes Roy). It is through loving and depending on the mysterious and incomprehensible that we come to “tolerate”, even embrace, the strangest thing of all: life itself.
The Big Idea: why we should embrace AI doctors
People are understandably wary of new technology, but human error is often more lethal
We expect our doctors to be demi-gods – flawless, tireless, always right. But they are only human. Increasingly, they are stretched thin, working long hours, under immense pressure, and often with limited resources. Of course, better conditions would help, including more staff and improved systems. But even in the best-funded clinics with the most committed professionals, standards can still fall short; doctors, like the rest of us, are working with stone age minds. Despite years of training, human brains are not optimally equipped for the pace, pressure, and complexity of modern healthcare.
Given that patient care is medicine’s core purpose, the question is who, or what, is best placed to deliver it? AI may still spark suspicion, but research increasingly shows how it could help fix some of the most persistent problems and overlooked failures – from misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care.
‘They had everything, then nothing’: the prodigies the art world forgot
Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were once the golden boys of London’s art scene – photographed in Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell and lauded by Francis Bacon. So why did they vanish into obscurity?
The world is burning. Fascism is rising. Countries are falling. And we’re on the brink of incredible technological change, which will either be the end of everything or a new beginning. So, who needs artists?
An August night in 1944. Robert Colquhoun’s hand shakes as he lights a candle in the blacked-out Notting Hill studio shared with his lover, fellow artist, Robert “Bobby” MacBryde. They are known – from Soho alleys to Bond Street galleries – as the Two Roberts: inseparable, incandescent, often in trouble. Where is Bobby tonight? The Colony Room Club, probably. Safe, Robert hopes. Though never from himself. Bombers prowl the skies above. Who will survive the night? “Fuck it,” Robert mutters, fag dancing on his lip. And he picks up his brush.
