Category Sách & Tri thức

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Books to look out for in 2026 – nonfiction

Memoirs from Liza Minnelli and Lena Dunham, essays by David Sedaris and Alan Bennett’s diaries are among the highlights of the year ahead

Over the past year we’ve been spoiled for memoirs from high-wattage stars – Cher, Patti Smith and Anthony Hopkins among them. But 2026 begins with a very different true story, from someone who never chose the spotlight, but now wants some good to come of her appalling experiences. After the trial that resulted in her husband and 50 others being convicted of rape or sexual assault, Gisèle Pelicot’s aim is to nurture “strength and courage” in other survivors. In A Hymn to Life (Bodley Head, February) she insists that “shame has to change sides”. Another trial – of the men accused of carrying out the Bataclan massacre – was the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s most recent book, V13. For his next, Kolkhoze (Fern, September), the French master of autofiction turns his unsparing lens back on himself, focusing on his relationship with his mother Hélène, and using it to weave a complex personal history of France, Russia and Ukraine. Family also comes under the microscope in Ghost Stories (Sceptre, May) by Siri Hustvedt, a memoir of her final years with husband Paul Auster, who died of cancer in 2024.

Hollywood isn’t totally out of the picture, though: The Steps (Seven Dials, May), Sylvester Stallone’s first autobiography, follows the star from homelessness in early 70s New York to Rocky’s triumph at the Oscars later that decade. Does achieving your creative dreams come at a price, though? Lena Dunham suggests as much in Famesick (4th Estate, April), billed as a typically frank memoir of how how her dramatic early success gave way to debilitating chronic illness. Frankness of a different kind is promised in More (Bloomsbury, September), actor Gillian Anderson’s follow-up to her bestselling 2024 anthology of women’s sexual fantasies, Want.

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Killing the Dead by John Blair review – a gloriously gruesome history of vampires

Shroud-chewers, lip-smackers and suckers populate this fascinating study of ‘the unquiet dead’ across the centuries

The word “vampire” first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojević, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it. In 1745, the clergyman John Swinton published an anonymous pamphlet, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, in which it is written: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.” And so a modern myth was born.

But it is not so modern, or exclusively European, as this extraordinary survey shows. Instead, the author, a historian and archeologist, argues that belief in the unquiet dead is found in many cultures and periods, where it can lay dormant for centuries before erupting in an “epidemic”, as in Serbia. Where there is no written source, John Blair makes persuasive use of archeological finds in which bodies are found to have been decapitated or nailed down. In 16th-century Poland, a buried woman “had a sickle placed upright across her throat and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot”. Someone, our author infers reasonably, wanted to keep these people in their coffins.

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Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember is Christmas No 1 in the UK’s bestsellers chart

The writer and illustrator’s follow-up to The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse sold roughly one copy every 14 seconds last week

Charlie Mackesy has scored the literary world’s Christmas No 1 with Always Remember, the follow-up to his bestselling 2019 title The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

Always Remember sold 43,825 copies in the seven days to 20 December, equating to a sale roughly every 14 seconds, according to NielsenIQ BookData. The illustrated fable – subtitled The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm – follows the four unlikely friends as they navigate meteorological and metaphorical dark clouds.

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What to read in 2026: recommendations from booksellers and publishers in Abuja, Nairobi and Brighton

A selection of the best Kenyan, Nigerian and black diaspora writing from 2025 – and some to look out for next year

From the richness of Nigeria’s modern literary scene, to the thriving publishing ecosystem of Kenya and the booming creativity coming from black British and African American writers, we asked an African publishing house, a UK bookshop dedicated to black authors and Nairobi’s oldest bookshop for some recommendations on what to read in the coming year.

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Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí billed itself as the “treasure of the world” and “envy of kings”. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China. The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as “the mountain that eats men”.

The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism: extravagant wealth, immense suffering, complex international networks, a world transformed. The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium. Like its subject, the book has a “tendency to grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity”. Fredric Jameson famously said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. At times during these 1,100 pages, I found it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.

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John Updike’s best books – Ranked!

Following the publication of the novelist’s letters, we count down the best of his books, from the dark magic of The Witches of Eastwick to the misadventures of Rabbit Angstrom

Inspired by and drawing on three British novels (HG Wells’s The Time Machine, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Henry Green’s Concluding), Updike’s debut imagines a near future where the residents of a care home stage a revolt in which two antagonists, John Hook and Stephen Conner, struggle for supremacy. A curio.
Updike tropes Religion, death

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Palaver by Bryan Washington review – a remix of the author’s greatest hits

From exile to family dysfunction, street food to sex, this stylish novel about a mother visiting her estranged gay son in Tokyo explores familiar themes

While we now use it to mean a fuss or convoluted mess, the origins of the word palaver, the title of Bryan Washington’s third novel, lie in the Portuguese term palavra, which simply means “word”. Over time, and possibly coloured by the historical context of Portuguese colonists’ rampages across the globe, “palaver” came to refer to a complex debate or negotiation between two culturally distinct parties.

Culture clashes, conflicted conversations, oppositions and exchanges are principal interests for Washington. His debut novel, 2020’s Memorial, was a sobering but sensitive consideration of a fracturing interracial gay relationship set between Houston and Osaka. This was followed in 2023 by Family Meal, again taking place in Houston, with its pithy observations of a combustible queer love triangle. Palaver centres on the tense relationship between protagonists “the son” and “the mother”. Guarded and prickly, the son is an American who has lived in Tokyo for the best part of a decade, teaching English as a foreign language. Throughout this period, he’s been estranged from his Jamaican-American mother back home in Texas. The novel opens with the equally crabby mother unexpectedly turning up on her son’s doorstep, and mostly covers the week and a half they spend together, moving between their two perspectives. Illuminated by Tokyo’s harsh neon, mother and son edge around reckonings with their bitter past of familial dysfunction, and make their way towards something resembling rapprochement.

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Poem of the week: Down on the canal on Christmas Day by Chris McCabe

A melancholy December vision in Liverpool invokes a Dickensian ghost with more worldly but still warm realism

Down on the canal on Christmas Day

Down on the canal on Christmas Day
a man walks towards me out of water-light,
upright, Cratchit-wrapped, a smile to say:
I know you. Hello Chris. Ghost in a time-ripped landscape
where a low solstice sun spills whisked
through a metallic staircase.
With joy, the man’s smile haunts me for miles —
a long blasted path, where a dead rat’s belly festoons
its purple crinoline Christmas hat.

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Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune tops 2025 UK bestsellers list

Fantasy, mystery and psychological thriller series dominate book sales, as adult colouring also makes a comeback

Fantasy, mystery and psychological thriller series dominate the UK’s bestsellers list for 2025, topped by Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune. The fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series secured the top position at 391,429 hardback sales.

Adult colouring also had a resurgence this year: colouring books aimed at all ages made it into the top 20 chart, according to analysis by NielsenIQ BookData.

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