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Humanity’s ancient relationship with bees is tracked from our earliest times through a history of ‘woman’s work’ to our collective peril today
Cuevas de la Araña (Spider Caves), Valencia, Spain, circa 6,000 BCE
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.
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.”
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.
The One Day author on laughing hysterically at Adrian Mole and coming around to Persuasion
My earliest reading memory
The Very Hungry Caterpillar. There wasn’t much to read – the prose is what’s now called “spare” – but I vividly remember the pleasure of poking a finger through the holes punched in the page. And that final twist!
My favourite book growing up
I was a fanatical member of the Puffin Club at school, and so many of those books embedded themselves in me; E Nesbit’s Dragons, Narnia, of course, the Molesworth books, which I barely understood and found hysterical. But my favourite were Tove Jansson’s Moomins, particularly the chilly later books, with their very particular melancholy. Other books seemed to be reaching for laughter or excitement, but there was a pleasure in all that sadness and solitude.
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.
This warm, funny account of a mercurial talent gone to waste teems with love for its subject
When the music journalist Will Hodgkinson proposed writing a book on Lawrence, ex-frontman of the post-punk band Felt and latterly of Go-Kart Mozart (recently re-christened Mozart Estate), he was told there would be conditions. Lawrence – who goes by his first name only – said he couldn’t speak to any old bandmates. Furthermore, there could be no anecdotes or use of the word “just”. Asked what is wrong with “just”, Lawrence tells him: “I just don’t like it.”
A simultaneously entertaining and melancholic account of an overlooked musician, Street-Level Superstar depicts the sixtysomething Lawrence as a pallid eccentric who passes his time walking around London, who lives on liquorice and milky tea and is fearful of cheese – “We know that in nature if something smells, it is dangerous to eat.” We learn that Lawrence hasn’t had a girlfriend for years. Reflecting on sex, he says: “I was a two-minute wonder. They’re not missing much.”
How the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker redefined high culture
Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse Jr became chair of Condé Nast, the magazine group owned by his father’s media company, Advance Publications, in 1975. Under his stewardship, Condé’s roster of glossy publications – titles such as Vogue, GQ and Glamour – broadened to include Architectural Digest, a revived Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Newhouse spent big in pursuit of clout, and his company’s extravagant approach to expenses became the stuff of legend. Condé positioned itself as a gatekeeper of high-end living but, as Michael Grynbaum explains in Empire of the Elite, its success in the 80s and 90s was down to its willingness to embrace “low” culture.
Condé brought pop stars, television personalities and tabloid intrigue into the highbrow fold, reconstituting cultural capital to fit the sensibilities of an emerging yuppie class with little interest in ballet or opera. Several moments stand out, in retrospect: GQ’s 1984 profile of Donald Trump, which paved the way for The Art of the Deal; Madonna’s 1989 debut on the cover of Vogue; and the New Yorker’s coverage of the OJ Simpson trial in 1994. Tina Brown, appointed editor of the New Yorker in 1992 after a decade at Vanity Fair, said she wanted “to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy”. Purists bemoaned what they saw as a slide into vulgar sensationalism, but Grynbaum maintains Brown “wasn’t so much dumbing down the New Yorker as expanding the universe to which it applied its smarts”.
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some fantastic new paperbacks, from a Booker-shortlisted novel to a groundbreaking history of a continent
