Category Sách & Tri thức

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The Barbecue at No 9 by Jennie Godfrey audiobook review – secrets and lies in suburbia

Gemma Whelan and Stephen Mangan are among the cast in this multi-voiced tale of family tensions and trauma, set during the 1985 Live Aid charity concert

It is July 1985, two days before Live Aid, the historic charity concert taking place simultaneously in London and Philadelphia to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Goth teenager Hanna Gordon has been asked by her mother, Lydia, to distribute invitations to their neighbours for a get-together at their house “in aid of the children”. Hanna suspects Lydia’s intentions may not be entirely charitable and that she wants to show off their new barbecue. Hanna’s longsuffering dad, Peter, isn’t keen, complaining “it’ll cost a fortune to feed the whole bloody street”.

Hanna, who is keeping a secret from her family, may be mortified at her mother’s party plans but she nonetheless does what she asks, delivering the invitations around their suburban cul-de-sac while only dimly aware of a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows. When Lydia spots the same figure a day later skulking in their garden, it is clear something is afoot on Delmont Close.

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Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth review – profound story of a woman’s love for a horse

Where does it come from, this passion for an animal that isn’t even hers? An astonishing debut delves into deep truths about love, motherhood and care

Mare, Emily Haworth-Booth’s wonderful first novel for adults, is about a woman confronting three life-altering crises. The first is an early menopause that means that she can now never have a child. Second, after years of success as a children’s book writer, she finds herself bereft of ideas. The third should, by all rights, be the least important: a passion for a horse that isn’t even hers. She pays to ride, feed, groom and muck out for the animal a few times a week. Perverse though it seems, this horse soon becomes the centre of her life: her beloved.

In a sense, Mare is about childlessness. It opens with reflections on motherhood: “I knew a mother who said, You want to know what it’s like? Write a list of all the things you love doing and then cross them out, one by one.” But also: “I knew a mother who knew all the other mothers. As she walked through the park … this mother stopped every few strides to be greeted by other mothers, some with buggies, some pregnant. Other mothers stuck to this mother like burrs. Meanwhile I hung by her side, dragged along like a limp kite.” The narrator has decided against having a baby, not for things-you-love-doing reasons, but because the idea of her child’s future in this ailing world terrified her. Considering it, her mind filled with images of “abandoned landscapes hostile to life. Burning cities, flooded cities, desertified meadows.”

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Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt shortlisted for Dylan Thomas prize

Six writers are now finalists for the prestigious annual prize, which awards £20,000 to a writer aged 39 or under

Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Harriet Armstrong, Colwill Brown, Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Suzannah V Evans also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under, in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

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Future of William Wordsworth’s Lake District home secured for the public

Romantic poet’s Rydal Mount and Gardens, marketed for over £2.5m, will remain open under Wordsworth Trust

It was the family home where William Wordsworth hosted Alfred, Lord Tennyson, lived as poet laureate and worked on his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude.

Now, after a long period of decline in visitor numbers, Rydal Mount and Gardens has been saved from descending into the “half-choked with willow flowers and weeds” state that Wordsworth described in his 1814 poem The Excursion – and will be preserved by a charity that will ensure it remains open to the public.

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When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review – the Indiana Jones of trees returns

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologists

It’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”

The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a try: few people can speak about trees with quite as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she is a Canadian national treasure and global environmental icon. When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she describes once sprinting through the forest with a syringe filled with radioactive isotopes in each hand as she is chased by a grizzly bear.

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Len Deighton, spy novelist and author of The Ipcress File, dies aged 97

British writer brought wit, realism and class consciousness to cold war espionage fiction, reshaping the genre in the 1960s

Len Deighton, the British author whose subversive spy novels helped redefine the genre in the 1960s, has died aged 97.

Best known for his debut, The Ipcress File, Deighton went on to write more than 30 books over a career spanning four decades, establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in postwar fiction. His work, often compared to that of John le Carré, combined meticulous research with wit and sharp observations about class and bureaucracy.

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The Delusions by Jenni Fagan review – an afterlife of queues and bureaucracy

A witty metaphysical satire about what happens when the processes that help souls pass on begin to fail

Jenni Fagan’s satirical fifth novel, The Delusions, opens with an epigraph from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction curiosity Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” The afterthought leaks back into the original statement, underpinning and undermining everything.

Infinity and eternity are both unavoidably present in The Delusions, which takes place in a vast anteroom to the afterlife, “the largest soul terminus in existence”. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a big-box store, where they help you sort your false perceptions of yourself from what you actually were, before you’re Processed and sent on to whatever comes next (or, should you fail the Questionnaire, Dissolved on the spot). Though to be honest, no one in Processing is certain what that next thing is.

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Better than Wuthering Heights? The Brontës’ novels – ranked!

As Emerald Fennell’s film sparks debate, we celebrate the pioneering brilliance of the siblings’ work

This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a male narrator, William Crimsworth, it offers a downbeat story of everyday middle-class striving as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher to see it thought it showed promise, despite being too short and insufficiently “striking and exciting”. Had the author anything else to offer? Luckily, Jane Eyre – which amply supplied the earlier book’s deficiencies – was already in train and was soon accepted with alacrity. Although The Professor remained unpublished in Charlotte’s lifetime, she continued to believe that it was “as good as I can write”; its subtly ironised male voice reveals her underlying literary sophistication.

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London book fair roundup: Idris Elba’s thriller deal, the rise of romcom, and fights against censorship

The actor led the starry book deals, while publishers assessed whether US-style bans are spreading to the UK

The annual London book fair wrapped on Thursday, marking the end of three days that saw 33,000 people connected to the book industry – agents, publishers, authors, among others – gather at Olympia to make deals and discuss the state of the publishing world, and its future. Here’s our roundup of the biggest deals, trends and takeaways from the fair.

The starriest book deal of the week was a new thriller series co-authored by Idris Elba, featuring an MI6 field operative who gets deployed to Mauritius to investigate an attempted murder. Elsewhere, rights were scooped for Alex Ferguson’s first autobiography in 13 years, broadcaster Mishal Husain’s debut children’s book, and the story of designer Paul Smith’s life.

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