Category Culture

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Brooklyn and beyond: Colm Tóibín’s best books – ranked!

As the Irish author turns 70, we rate his best works of fiction – from his latest, Long Island, to his emotionally wrenching ‘masterpiece’

This dispatch from what we might call the extended Colm Tóibín universe is set near the same time and in the same place as his earlier novel Brooklyn (one character appears in both books). It’s the story of a widowed woman who struggles to cope with life after love. If it lacks the drama of some of Tóibín’s other novels, the style is impeccable as ever, with irresistibly clean prose that reports emotional turmoil masked by restraint. There is no ornate showing off. “People used to tease me for it, saying: ‘Could you write a longer sentence?’” Tóibín has said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

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Men in Love by Irvine Welsh review – the Trainspotting boys grow up

Three decades on from the author’s breakthrough debut, why are we still trapped in the Trainspotting moment?

It has been more than 30 years since Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting. To put that in perspective, it’s as distant to readers today as Catch-22 or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been in 1993. If you are anything like me, that doesn’t feel quite right. Because even at such a historical remove, there remains something undeniably resonant, something curiously current, about Welsh’s wiry, demotic, scabrous debut.

In part, this is explained by the sheer scale of Trainspotting’s success. It was one of those genuinely rare literary events, wherein a critically acclaimed, stylistically adventurous book catches the cultural zeitgeist to such a degree that it also becomes a commercial sensation, going on to sell over a million copies. Its cultural salience was further compounded by Danny Boyle’s cinematic adaptation, one of the highest-grossing UK films of all time, a visual intervention that seemed to crystallise the aesthetics of Britpop – high velocity, high audacity, high nostalgia.

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Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?

Why does the online world seem so toxic compared with normal life? Our research shows that a small number of divisive accounts could be responsible – and offers a way out

When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil. The contrast between the online world and my daily reality has only gotten more jarring.

Since my own work is focused on topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change, I’m aware of the many challenges facing humanity. Yet, it seems striking that people online seem to be just as furious about the finale of The White Lotus or the latest scandal involving a YouTuber. Everything is either the best thing ever or the absolute worst, no matter how trivial. Is that really what most of us are feeling? No, as it turns out. Our latest research suggests that what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users.

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Irvine Welsh: ‘I’m often astounded that any relationships take place these days’

The follow-up to Trainspotting sees Renton, Begbie and co settling down. The bestselling author explains why now is the perfect time for romance

I was born in the great port of Leith. Stories are in my blood; listening to them, telling them. My family were typical of many in the area, moving from tenement to council scheme, increasingly further down the Forth estuary. I was brought up in a close community. I left school with practically no qualifications. I tended towards the interesting kids, the troublemakers. All my own fault. I was always encouraged to be more scholarly by my parents, who valued education. But I left school and became an apprentice technician, doing a City & Guilds course. I hated it. I was always a writer: I just didn’t know it. I cite being crap at everything else in evidence.

It’s why I’ve never stopped writing stories about my youth and my go-to gang of characters from Trainspotting. Their reaction to events and changes in the world helps inform my own. They’ve been given substance by people I’ve met down the decades, from Leith pubs to Ibiza clubs.

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Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout

A guide to the Pulitzer-winning novelist’s tales of small-town life, family secrets, and fraught relationships

American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers’ imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels – often set in Maine, where she grew up – have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women’s prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre.

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Publication of The Salt Path author’s new book is delayed amid scandal

Penguin said release date of On Winter Hill would be changed in order to ‘support the author’ after allegations that Raynor Winn lied in her bestselling memoir

Penguin, publisher of The Salt Path, is delaying author Raynor Winn’s next book after reporting cast doubt over the truth of the 2018 memoir. The decision was taken to “support the author,” according to a statement.

The Salt Path tells the story of Winn and her husband, Moth, who embark on a 630-mile walk after their house is repossessed and Moth is diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a terminal illness.

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Clare Chambers: ‘Iris Murdoch taught me that a novel could be about absolutely anything’

The author on Anthony Trollope, Andrew Miller, and why she sided with 19th-century coal miners

My earliest reading memory
I have the fuzziest memory of an illustrated Grimms’ fairy tale called Jorinde and Joringel from the time before I could read. I made my mum take it out of the library over and over again. It was about a quest for a flower with some special powers. I wish I could remember why it had such a hold over me.

My favourite book growing up
I think a sense of humour is forged in childhood and I remember crying with laughter as my older sister read me the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. It didn’t bother me that they were all about prep school boys – it was the comedy of embarrassment that really spoke to me.

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Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all

A picaresque story of massive success and deep despair that Rowland narrates with an impressive lack of self-pity

In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland’s extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys’ image threw a spanner in the works. “I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of ‘plus fours’,” writes Rowland of a typical outfit. “I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.”

Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how they look is so disconcerting, even their manager seems baffled. After a gig supporting the Specials, at which their appearance so enrages the crowd that the band have to be locked in a dressing room (“for our own safety”), they tone things down completely and begin taking to the stage in donkey jackets and mariner-style beanie hats.

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Orbital by Samantha Harvey audiobook review – lyrical, hypnotic reading of otherworldly tale

Sarah Naudi reads the Booker-prize-winning novel about the daily lives of astronauts on the International Space Station

Tracking the movements of six astronauts on the International Space Station, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital – the winner of last year’s Booker prize – imagines the day-to-day lives of those who have chosen to be “shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb and then through the atmosphere in a burning capsule with the equivalent weight of two black bears upon them”.

Only basic information is provided about the crew, who are from Russia, the United States, Japan, Italy and the UK. Harvey is more interested in the tasks undertaken to keep themselves healthy and their lodgings shipshape. Simultaneously expansive and intimate, Orbital reveals how the usual routines of eating, sleeping and exercising are fraught with challenges when you are weightless: toothpaste foam must be swallowed rather than spat out and cutlery adhered to the table using magnets.

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Inside the Salt Path controversy: ‘Scandal has stalked memoir since the genre was invented’

Raynor Winn’s bestselling book is far from the first time a true story has been called into question after publication. But how does it happen? And should readers really feel betrayed?

“The Salt Path is an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story,” reads the description of Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir on its publisher Penguin Random House’s website.

Which is unfortunate wording if accusations made at the weekend turn out to be true: an investigation by the Observer alleged that the 2018 book – which has recently been adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs – is not all that it seems. Winn writes in The Salt Path that she and her husband, Moth, had their home repossessed due to an investment in a friend’s company that went on to fail. With nowhere to live, as she tells it, the couple decided to walk the length of the South West Coast Path, wild camping along the way and relying on the kindness of strangers. The Observer piece suggests Winn’s account of becoming homeless is untruthful, and reports that she took £64,000 from her former employer. It also questions the legitimacy of Moth’s diagnosis with the neurological condition corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a core part of the memoir.

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