Category Sách & Tri thức

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A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke review – a brilliant, blunt and beautiful memoir

The actor on being called ugly, telling Johnny Rotten to F-off, and striking gold at Cannes

Kathy Burke’s mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; she writes that it made her “feel dead famous” in her community. She was raised by her older brothers, John and Barry, who were 10 and eight when it happened, and sometimes by their father Pat, an alcoholic for many years, violent with it, who struggled to care for his family. Pat and Bridget had moved to London from Ireland, and the Burkes lived on an estate in Islington, where the other families played a vital role in raising and feeding the children. On his deathbed, in 1994, Pat asked Kathy to do two things: to give up smoking, and to write more. It has only taken her 30 years, she says, but she’s finally done the latter.

The entertainment industry is top-heavy with people from middle-and upper-class backgrounds who have a limited understanding of lives that don’t resemble their own. In my experience, one of the misconceptions they have about working-class life is that it is all grey skies and kitchen‑sink misery. Burke’s memoir has its painful moments, but the joy radiating from it is palpable and invigorating.

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Booker prize launches £50,000 children’s award

Children will help judge the new prize along with children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce

• ‘The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter’: Frank Cottrell-Boyce

The Booker prize foundation has launched a major new literary award, the Children’s Booker prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12.

The new award will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award. The inaugural chair of judges will be Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s author and current children’s laureate. He will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help select a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to help decide the winner.

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The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter

As the number of children reading for pleasure hits a record low, the new award highlights its importance for wellbeing, and will give away thousands of books

At the end of the movie Ratatouille, the food reviewer Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’Toole, makes this beautiful defence of the art of the critic: “There are times when a critic truly risks something. That is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” The Booker prize has been a friend to the new – new voices, new names, new ways of telling a story – for 56 years. It has made household names of writers whose work might otherwise only have been enjoyed by a few. More importantly – especially since the launch of the International Booker in 2005 – it has helped broaden the horizons of readers.

Now there’s going to be a Booker prize for children’s books aimed at readers aged eight to 12, and I am going to be the first chair of judges. Despite my vast vocabulary, I can’t begin to tell you how hopeful this makes me. Because if the Children’s Booker brings the same energy and boldness to the world of children’s books, it’s going to make a real difference to the lives of thousands of children. It comes at a crucial moment. Everyone knows that children who read for pleasure do better educationally and emotionally. Yet – as we approach the government’s Year of Reading – we find ourselves in a situation where the number of children who read daily has dropped to a 20-year low. We risk losing a whole generation.

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The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits audiobook review – an American road trip with a twist

A law professor leaves his failing marriage and faltering career and hits the open road in this Booker-shortlisted novel of midlife turmoil

At the start of The Rest of Our Lives, we learn that Tom, a 55-year-old law professor from New York, plans to leave his wife just as soon as he has dropped their youngest child off at college. Tom and Amy have been together for 30 years. He believes theirs to be a “C-minus marriage” which was irreparably ruptured when Amy had an affair 12 years previously. And so, after leaving their daughter Miriam at college in Pittsburgh, he keeps on driving, revisiting old friends and places in search of his departed youth.

Benjamin Markovits’s 12th novel – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize – could be seen as a companion piece to Miranda July’s celebrated All Fours in its exploration of the dissatisfaction of middle age. Tom is not a reliable narrator of his life, though he is nonetheless a compelling protagonist even in his flagrant moments of self-deception.

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The Rose Field by Philip Pullman – nail-biting conclusion to the Northern Lights series

The Book of Dust trilogy is brought to a complex and fitting end as Lyra battles the Magisterium over her lost imagination

Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman’s magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force “is destroying the air and the seasons”; at the same time, “money’s going bad, and no one knows why”. Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. “Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly”, says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. “Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way.”

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman’s concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It’s a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

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New Mr Poirot and Little Miss Marple books to be published

Agatha Christie’s popular detectives feature in new Mr Men and Little Miss stories – Mischief on the Nile and Muddle at the Vicarage

The latest adaptation of Agatha Christie’s works features an unlikely new suspect: Mr Tickle, of Mr Men and Little Miss fame.

Joining the likes of Mr Nosey and Little Miss Chatterbox are Mr Poirot and Little Miss Marple, who star in new retellings of some of Christie’s most famous stories.

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Iris Murdoch’s poems on bisexuality to be published – read one exclusively here

Drawn mostly from notebooks discovered in the attic of the late novelist and philosopher’s Oxford home, a new collection spans 60 years and touches on deeply personal themes

A previously unpublished series of poems by the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch is to be printed, shedding new light on her life and relationships, and marking the first time the writer’s bisexuality has been explored in her published works of fiction or poetry.

Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.

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The Revolutionists by Jason Burke review – from hijackings to holy war

A colourful study of the evolution of extremism in the tumultuous 1970s

No one knew what to call them. For some they were “skyjackers”, for others “air bandits”. Neither name stuck, but by 1970, these figures were fixtures of the western political landscape. It helped that hijacking planes was easy. Bag checks, metal detectors and frisking at airports were proposed, only to be dismissed as overkill.

The result was a lethal carnival of transnational terrorism that peaked in the 70s, when commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke’s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail – sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols – with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history.

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The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee review – newly discovered stories from an American great

If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But these juvenile stories and essays shed fascinating light on the repression of Lee’s early life

When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.

This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee’s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No deception is being practised here, and if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans.

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Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre review – a devastating exposé of power, corruption and abuse

Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir lays bare the life-wrecking impact of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes – but it is also the story of how a young woman becomes a hero

There is a strand running through Nobody’s Girl – a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April this year – in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse. “I know it is a lot to take in,” she writes after a gruelling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.” After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.”

Throughout the book, Giuffre beguiles, apologises and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely enabled by Giuffre’s testimony. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.

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