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The Mission by Tim Weiner review – unmasking the CIA

This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer

In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.

In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question. As he showed nearly 20 years ago in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA from its founding in 1947 to the end of the 20th century, the agency’s position by the end of the 90s was pretty desperate. It was starved of cash and bleeding talent. A high-flyer who had been station chief in Bucharest was revealed to be working for the Russians, handing them the names of large numbers of agents and employees. But the new US administration that came in at the start of 2001 wasn’t too worried. In March that year, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, told the joint chiefs of staff: “For the first time in decades, the country faces no strategic challenge.” Six months later came 9/11. The CIA had tried to convince the feckless George W Bush about the looming threat of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, but no one in the administration listened. The agency was regarded as broken.

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Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter prize for writing on migration and faith

Judges praised the Sudanese author for centring Muslim women, describing her writing as “a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration”

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

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Havoc by Rebecca Wait review – a Saint Trinian’s tragicomedy

A mysterious illness sweeps through an isolated girls’ boarding school, in a work brimming with horror, humour and hysteria

Even if it wasn’t perched on a cliff on the south coast, the position of St Anne’s, Eastbourne – the decaying girls’ school that is the setting for Rebecca Wait’s gleefully macabre new novel, Havoc – might reasonably be described as precarious. Deeply eccentric, staffed by the barely employable, and permanently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, St Anne’s hangs on, against all the odds. And then, in 1984, Ida Campbell turns up on the doorstep, in possession of a full scholarship and rather a lot of baggage.

Sixteen years old and already an outcast, Ida is in flight from her hapless mother, her foul-tempered sister, the small community in the Western Isles to which they have been transplanted, and the nameless scandal that has ruined their lives. St Anne’s is to be Ida’s salvation, but it soon dawns on her that the school might not be quite the refuge she had hoped for.

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AI translation service launched for fiction writers and publishers prompts dismay among translators

UK-based GlobeScribe is charging $100 per book, per language for use of its services, but translators say that nuanced work can only be produced by humans

An AI fiction translation service aimed at both traditional publishers and self-published authors has been launched in the UK. GlobeScribe.ai is currently charging $100 per book, per language for use of its translation services.

“There will always be a place for expert human translation, especially for highly literary or complex texts,” said the founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, which specialises in crime and thrillers. “But GlobeScribe.ai opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

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Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar review – night terrors

The Guardian’s theatre critic’s imaginative exploration of life in the shadows

Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a “difficult” night.

That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter’s book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives.

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Author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path accused of lying

Raynor Winn is claimed to have taken ‘around £64,000’ from a former employer and lied about being homeless – accusations that Winn calls ‘highly misleading’

It has been one of the films of the summer so far – the tale of Raynor Winn and her husband Moth, who embark on the 630-mile South West Coast Path walk after their house is repossessed and Moth is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

There has been almost universal praise for the life-affirming story of The Salt Path, which has won rave reviews from critics. Until now.

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Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review – an extraordinary debut

This brilliant short-story collection confronts the knotty truths of Northern Ireland’s bloody past

The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney’s North (1975), Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns’s Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them?

“I believe, these things, they’re the making of us,” a character says at one point. He’s talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland’s past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it.

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Paula Bomer: ‘If you describe yourself as a victim, you’re dismissed’

Having made waves as part of the alt-lit movement, the US author is poised to go mainstream with The Stalker, her most exhilarating work yet

When I arrive at Paula Bomer’s apartment building in south Brooklyn I am briefly disoriented in the lobby, until I hear the yapping of dogs and amid them, her voice calling my name. Bomer is tall and striking, in her mid-50s. I met her last year at a reading in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she seemed like someone who cared almost manically about literature and also like someone who would be fun to hang out with, two qualities not always confluent. I had heard of these anxious dogs before, when she and I met for dinner a few months ago, and she disclosed that her life was now spent managing canine neuroses.

“I got them when my dad died,” she says, in between offering me matcha, coffee, tequila or wine (it’s 2.30pm on a Sunday; Bomer doesn’t drink any more, save a glass of champagne on selling her book, but doesn’t mind if others do). “The dogs were a mistake,” she says, “But that’s OK, I’ll survive it.”

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‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel

Demon Copperhead, the author’s retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis, was a global success. Now she has used royalties from the novel to open a recovery residence

In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there’s a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book “hard to read”. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, “because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.”

Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion.

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My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud review – Hideous Kinky, the teenage years

A subtle, intriguing sequel revisits two girls as they grow into adults and question the impact of their unconventional upbringing

Esther Freud’s childhood on the Moroccan hippy trail inspired her 1992 debut Hideous Kinky. That novel was told through a young child’s limited perspective, so daily life was described vividly – almond trees and coloured kaftans – while bigger issues, such as why she didn’t see her father, remained vague and mysterious.

Some 30 years later, Freud has returned to the same narrator, Lucy. But in this accomplished new novel, she explores how Lucy grows up and starts to question the impact of her unconventional upbringing. My Sister and Other Lovers opens with teenage Lucy, her mother and sister once again on the move. It’s the 1970s, her mother has a new son from another failed relationship, and they are on a ferry to Ireland, as they have no money and nowhere else to go.

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