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Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
The user-friendly short chapter format of Nicci Cloke’s Her Many Faces, designed for our internet-lowered attention spans, obscures the fact that this page-turning, multiple viewpoint thriller is actually a densely plotted novel full of amazing twists. This is the book you want to take on a long, boring journey you’re dreading. You’ll pray you finish it before you arrive at your destination.
Men in Love by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver’s titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible.
More than 40 years on from its first publication, this exploration of one woman’s thoughts and fantasies is a gem worthy of rediscovery
There’s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.
Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.
A huge hit in Sweden, this portrait of one man and his dog as the end approaches is a simple yet effective meditation on mortality, love and care
Lisa Ridzén’s debut, which has been a runaway success in her Swedish homeland and elsewhere, demonstrates how sometimes the simplest storytelling can be the most effective. This is a novel with no clever structural devices or burden of symbolism and a setting so limited geographically that the reader ends up knowing precisely where everything is.
It is narrated by Bo, a former timbermill worker who has reached the age when people worry about him, and has a network of carers calling in three times a day. One of Ridzén’s inspirations was the team journal kept by the carers looking after her dying grandfather; very movingly, bulletins from the journal of Bo’s carers punctuate his narrative, the alternative perspective like a chill breeze through a briefly opened door.
Actor and book prize judge’s production company in process of developing novel by Claire Adam
An apparent conflict of interest has emerged over the Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker’s judging of this year’s Booker prize.
A production company run by the actor is reportedly in the process of developing a book written by Claire Adam, whose second novel, Love Forms, appears on this year’s longlist, announced on Tuesday.
There’s glamour, Goop and ghosting in this an unsparing account of Paltrow’s world
Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow’s general ability to sell dumb ideas to credulous rich women using widespread mockery as her marketing rocket fuel. (In case you need a reminder: this was the $66 jade egg Paltrow sold via her lifestyle brand Goop that promised various health benefits upon insertion.) Amy Odell’s book, billed as delivering “insight and behind-the-scenes details of Paltrow’s relationships, family, friendships, iconic films”, as well as her creation of Goop, takes no particular stand on this, nor on many of Paltrow’s more divisive episodes, instead offering us what feels like an earnest jog back through the actor and wellness guru’s years of fame. The author writes in the acknowledgments that she spoke to 220 people for the book, in which case we have to assume that a great many of them had little to say.
To be fair to Odell, whose previous biography was of Anna Wintour, another difficult and controlling subject – although Wintour did give Odell some access – Paltrow’s world is notoriously hard to break into if she’s not on board with a project; the author quotes numerous hacks tasked with profiling Paltrow for magazines who found themselves iced out of her networks, and the same happens to her in the early stages of research. Odell’s task only gets harder in the second half of the book, which tackles the Goop years. Since, she claims, many of its staff signed NDAs, those sections lack even the modest stream of gossip that enlivens the first half.
Chair of judges Roddy Doyle says the 13 ‘gripping’ titles in contention for the £50,000 award all ‘examine identity, individual or national’
• Comment: This year’s Booker prize longlist looks in new directions
Kiran Desai, Tash Aw and David Szalay are among the authors nominated for the 2025 Booker prize, on a longlist that features writers from nine different nationalities – the most global list for a decade.
The judging panel, which this year includes Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker alongside Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and chair of judges Roddy Doyle, also chose books by Katie Kitamura, Andrew Miller, Ben Markovits and Jonathan Buckley as part of their “Booker dozen” longlist of 13 titles.
We shouldn’t celebrate a falling population, according to this persuasive debunking of demographic myths
As a member of the 8.23 billion-strong human community, you probably have an opinion on the fact that the global population is set to hit a record high of 10 billion within the next few decades. Chances are, you’re not thrilled about it, given that anthropogenic climate change is already battering us and your morning commute is like being in a hot, jiggling sardine-tin.
Yet according to Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, academics at the University of Texas, what we really need to be worried about is depopulation. The number of children being born has been declining worldwide for a couple of hundred years. More than half of countries, including India, the most populous nation in the world, now have birthrates below replacement levels. While overall population has been rising due to declining (mainly infant) mortality, we’ll hit a peak soon before falling precipitously. This apex and the rollercoaster drop that follows it is the eponymous “spike”.
An atheist’s complaint at the scant room made by the church for his personal commemoration of the dead
A Hundred Doors
God! I’m lighting candles again, still
The sentimental atheist, family
Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse
Our Lady of a Hundred Doors.
Set a decade from now, this coming-of-age caper offers a child’s-eye view of family troubles in a ‘post-democracy’ USA
Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.
Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.