Category Sách & Tri thức

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Seamus Heaney’s unpublished poems to be released — read one exclusively here

The Poems of Seamus Heaney, out on Thursday, will feature all 12 of the revered Irish author’s collections alongside uncollected works and 25 poems yet to be published

A trove of unpublished poems by the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney is set to be printed alongside his collected and uncollected poems, published together for the first time.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney will feature his 12 collections interspersed with poems published in magazines, journals and newspapers, plus 25 poems selected from Heaney’s large number of unpublished works.

Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar is an unpublished poem by Seamus Heaney extracted from The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, to be published by Faber & Faber on 9 October 2025 (£40). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Bryan Washington and Rabih Alameddine among National Book Award finalists

This year’s fiction contenders also include Karen Russell, Megha Majumdar and Ethan Rutherford

Bryan Washington, Rabih Alameddine and Karen Russell are among the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards.

The three authors will compete in the fiction category alongside Megha Majumdar and Ethan Rutherford. Last year’s prize was handed to Percival Everett for James, his reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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‘Great range and power’: TS Eliot poetry prize shortlist announced

Ten poets, including Tom Paulin and Sarah Howe, appear on the shortlist for the £25,000 award, which judges described as offering ‘something for everyone’

Tom Paulin and Sarah Howe are among the poets shortlisted for this year’s £25,000 TS Eliot prize, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious award for a single volume of poetry.

The shortlist features 10 collections from established names and new voices, ranging from meditations on illness and inheritance to explorations of ecological collapse and exile.

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The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof review – a Danish series that burns with purpose

This incandescent novel takes in lockdown, the devil, bad investments, erotic thrills and the deadly fire on the Scandinavian Star ferry

At about 2am on the night of 7 April 1990, a fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training coupled with jammed fire doors aiding the spread of the fire and the subsequent release of deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from burning laminates resulted in the deaths of 159 people. The disaster was initially blamed on one of the passengers – a lorry driver and convicted arsonist. The fact that this suspect was also one of the fire’s casualties and thus unable to refute the charges against him was almost certainly part of the reason why the truth about the tragedy took so long to come to light. In 2020, a six-hour documentary revealed that the fire had most likely been started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is travelling on a bus through Copenhagen when she finds her attention drawn to an elderly man on the street outside. As the bus moves away, she has the “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to travel the same route again in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is at once alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, a couple whose feelings for each other are struggling to survive the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In that book’s final pages, we learn that the root of Kurt’s disaffection might possibly be found in the shattering effects of a bad investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

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The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist

Between 2022 and 2023, as many as 170 rare and valuable editions of Russian classics were stolen from libraries across Europe. Were the thieves merely low-level opportunists, or were bigger forces at work?

On 16 October 2023, a young man and woman sat down in the back row of the second-floor reading room of the university library of Warsaw, Poland. Their reading cards carried the names Sylvena Hildegard and Marko Oravec. On the desk in front of them were eight books with yellowing pages that they had ordered up from the library’s closed-storage 19th-century collection: rare editions of classic works of poetry, drama and fiction by two greats of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They studied the books closely, taking photographs on their phones and measurements with rulers.

When the duo did not return from a cigarette break and the invigilators checked their desk, they found that five of the eight books had gone. One of the missing Pushkin works was a narrative poem about the adventures of two outlaws, The Robber Brothers. It was as if the thieves had wanted to send a message.

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‘Jilly Cooper was the absolute queen’: writers pay tribute to the beloved author

The writer was an astute observer of English class – and a champion of complicated female heroines

• Jilly Cooper, author of Rivals and Riders, dies aged 88
• Share your memories of Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper was a genuinely merry soul, with a gimlet eye and a determination to see the best in absolutely everything; even when her life was difficult, she brightened every room with her spaniel hair. What fun she had and shared with us, and what a wonderful legacy she left.

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Jilly Cooper, author of Rivals and Riders, dies aged 88

The author of 18 ‘bonkbuster’ novels including Riders, Rivals and Bella has died following a fall

Jilly Cooper has died at the age of 88, her agent has confirmed.

The author, whose 18 novels include Riders and Rivals, “defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over 50 years ago,” said her agent Felicity Blunt. “You wouldn’t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things – class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.”

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The Elements by John Boyne review – intertwined tales of trauma

Four novellas about damaged people weighed down by the crimes they have suffered draw you efficiently in, but the cumulative effect is numbing

Twelve-year-old Freya is visiting her self-absorbed mother in Cornwall when she meets the 14-year-old twins. “The only thing better than knowing a secret,” they tell her, “is having one of your own.” In the weeks that follow, they will rape her, then bury her alive, a mix of anxiety and annoyance flitting across their faces as they eventually release her from her makeshift coffin.

This might have stood as the shocking centrepiece of a novel, but it’s just one of many terrible events in The Elements, which collects four novellas – published separately between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters negotiate past trauma and try to find peace in the present.

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The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes review – wild times with young Tennyson

A masterful account of the poet’s early life during the tumultuous 19th century crisis of faith

Alfred Tennyson was a divided soul. He even wrote a poem called The Two Voices in which dual versions of himself argued out the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes has chosen to focus on the lesser known of the poet’s personae.

The year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. He became, as a result, both famous and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. He had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or dossing down with bachelor friends in London, or lurking alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire’s bleak beaches. Now he took a house where he could receive distinguished visitors. (When Prince Albert came calling, Tennyson was so far from obsequious that he forgot to invite the queen’s consort to sit down, though he did at least offer the poor man a drink.) He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.

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