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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.
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A previously unpublished series of poems by the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch is to be printed, shedding new light on her life and relationships, and marking the first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.
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.
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.
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.
From shadowing a cocaine-addled David Bowie to winning over Joni Mitchell, deliciously readable tales from the director of Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe spent his youth being in the right place at the right time. In 1964, aged seven, he was taken by his mother to see “a kid named Bob Dylan” play a local college gym. By the age of 14, living in San Diego, he was writing record reviews for a local underground magazine whose main aim was to bring down Richard Nixon. Shortly after that, he started interviewing the bands of the day as they came through California – first Humble Pie for Creem, and then the Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin for Rolling Stone.
Crowe previously fictionalised his story in the 2000 film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed. His lyrical and compulsively readable memoir The Uncool is bookended by the opening of a musical version, which coincides with the death of Crowe’s mother Alice whose aphorisms, including “Put some goodness in the world before it blows up”, are scattered throughout the book. Alice insisted that Crowe skip two school grades, driving his precocity; she was also dead against rock’n’roll on account of its unbridled hedonism. When Crowe asks her what Elvis did on The Ed Sullivan Show that was so subversive he had to be filmed from the waist up, she “clinically” replies: “He had an erection”.
The American author discusses our need for fiction in an age of disconnection, the challenges of growing up with 14 step-siblings, and why she’s going ‘all in’ on romance
The cover of Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, features an abstracted face sobbing white tears on a tangerine background. It is an appropriate image, given that so many early readers – from BookTokkers to fellow authors – have reported weeping uncontrollably during the book’s final third.
For King, the reaction was unexpected. “I certainly felt a lot of emotion while I was writing. Not sobbing, more a deeper grief,” she says. But she describes the writing of her sixth novel, which begins with a 1980s college love story then revisits the same characters in middle age, as a joyful experience. “It was really great to just go back to the 1980s and college. It was a relief.”
Serial killers and violent criminals dominate the headlines. What if we covered ecocide and pollution in the same way?
Whenever you read, watch, or listen to the news, you’re likely to be exposed to stories of violence and murder. As a criminal psychologist, I’m often asked to comment on these cases to pick apart the motives of the perpetrators. People want these kinds of insights because murders feel frightening and horrifying, but also oddly compelling. There’s a level of focus and fascination, and the way these crimes are covered profoundly influences our perception of what the most urgent problems facing society are.
One day it struck me that the world would be a very different place if environmental crimes were treated in the same way as murders. So, why aren’t they? And should they be?
When she died, the writer left behind a cache of notebooks and manuscripts. Her biographer reveals what they tell us about her unlikely rise to literary stardom
When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in the summer of 1960, it seemed to have sprung from nowhere, like an Alabamian Athena: a perfectly formed novel from an unknown southern writer without any evident precedent or antecedent. The book somehow managed to be both urgently of its time and instantly timeless, addressing the era’s most turbulent issues, from the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution, while also speaking in the register of the eternal, from the moral awakening of children and the abiding love of families to the frictions between the self and society.
But no writer is without influences and aspirations: Harper Lee had, of course, come from somewhere and worked tremendously hard to become someone. It was only because she did not like talking about herself that her origins seemed so mysterious, and inevitably, the better To Kill a Mockingbird did – becoming a bestseller and then winning a Pulitzer prize, selling 1m copies and then 10m and then 40m – the more theories and rumours rushed in to fill her silence. In the years after the book came out, the public image of Lee swung between two of her beloved characters: she was either the living incarnation of her feisty, tomboyish heroine Jean Louise “Scout” Finch or, in her seeming reclusiveness, a version of that shy shadow figure, Arthur “Boo” Radley.
The Korean author’s hit self-help memoir, which follows her conversations with her psychiatrist, sold more than a million copies worldwide
Baek Se-hee, the author of the hit self-help memoir I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, has died at the age of 35.
According to the Korean organ donation agency, Baek saved five lives through the donation of her heart, lungs, liver and both kidneys.