Interesting Ideas

What books are there to look forward to for the rest of the summer? Fall? Winter? As the second half of the year approaches, we have you covered with our most anticipated reads for the last six months of 2025, including plenty of fresh contemporary fiction, an exciting haul of speculative and historical works, and some bookish nonfiction, such as a new biography of James Baldwin and memoirs from Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy. We’ll be featuring some of these upcoming titles in our digital magazine, as well as our First Impressions program and book club.

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A single missing word in the 1902 poem sparks a deeper look at rhythm, dialect and longing

Sea-Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

In 1983, Octavia E. Butler published “Speech Sounds” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a short story that would win her her first Hugo Award a year later. Written, as Butler put it in the afterword, “in weariness, depression, and sorrow” and with “little hope or liking for the human species,” the story ends in a […]

From dazzling debuts to unmissable memoirs, prize-winning novels to page-turning histories … Plus our pick of paperbacks and children’s fiction

• Leading authors choose their perfect holiday reading

• The 10 best audiobooks for summer

Dream Countby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A rich exploration of female experience, Adichie’s first novel in 10 years charts the lives and loves of four women in Nigeria and the US, from a “dream count” of ex-boyfriends to a section inspired by Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a Guinean hotel worker in 2011. Magisterial, wide-ranging and delicately done.

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.

I can’t remember a time when stories weren’t a part of my life. Mum says I was born with a book in my hand. I know mums always say things like this but maybe it is true. From a young age I read and read, transporting myself to places and lands far removed from my […]

It wasn’t the first hit memoir to tell a story of redemption inspired by the great outdoors – but could it become one of the last? Authors and publishers assess the damage

When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven’t read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth’s emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth’s diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand.

But it wasn’t the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old’s hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she’d grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year’s bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some fantastic new paperbacks, from a Booker-shortlisted novel to a groundbreaking history of a continent

Over the past fifteen years, my literary footsteps have followed a path through some of the most storied museums in the country, and the world, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. […]

As Mrs Dalloway turns 100, the novelistcelebrates a classic about love, loss and the irresistible allure of the capital

It’s always a surprise when ecstasy arrives. Recently, I’ve found myself waking early, with dawn on the horizon. I think it might be beautiful to catch the sunrise, and in those quiet moments, I am reminded of the bustle of the city, or a lover’s hand in mine, or the words that I couldn’t quite say, and, looking back towards the sky, find the sun already risen. I rue that I’ve missed it; I’m surprised it arrived so quickly. But for a moment, the light shines bright; and briefly, the parts of myself I don’t always get to are illuminated. In these moments, I’m reminded of our aliveness.

Much of my writing practice is concerned with closing the gap between emotion and expression. The sense of loss in this chasm is inevitable; it’s impossible to translate the excitement of seeing a loved one across the room, or the bodily jolt that arrives when you pass a friend on the street and realise you have become strangers. But still, I try to write, as Virginia Woolf did, not so much concerned with knowledge, but with feeling. And since language won’t always get you there, I employ music, rhythm.

In this bleak, bestselling coming-of-age debut, the author evokes life with the seven dads he had in seven years

For Mum (NB: not in a passive aggressive way)”reads the dedication at the beginning of this distinctive debut. It gives us a promising flavour of the voice with whom we’ll be spending the next 340 pages.

The story begins with deceptive simplicity: “Once upon a time, I had seven dads in seven years. This is the story of those years.” The narrative has a section for each “dad”, charting Andrev’s tumultuous childhood and teens as his mother’s boyfriends come and go, all of them disappointing and disruptive, and several of them violent. The dads are named for their dominant trait in young Andrev’s eyes: so we get the Plant Magician, the Thief, the Murderer, the Artist, among others.

Memoir Nation: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is an extension of the Memoir Nation community hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner, two friends and colleagues who bring a community-minded sensibility to the writing journey. Originally launched as Write-minded in 2018, this is a weekly writing podcast that focuses on memoir and personal writing, as well as industry […]

Newly decoded extracts expose the celebrated 17th-century diarist and naval administrator as a rapacious abuser

Samuel Pepys’s diary, which covers 1660 to 1669, is regarded as one of the great classic texts in the English language. Words spill out of Pepys – 1.25m of them – as he bustles around London, building a successful career as a naval administrator while navigating the double trauma of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Historians have long gone to the diary for details of middle-class life during the mid‑17th century: the seamy streets, the watermen, the taverns and, as Pepys moves up the greasy pole, the court and the king. Best of all is his eye for the picturesque detail: the way, for instance, on the morning of 4 September 1666, as fire licks around his house, Pepys buries a choice parmesan cheese in the garden with the intention of keeping it safe.

Not all of the diary is in English, though. Quite a lot of it is in French (or rather Franglais), Latin, Spanish and a curious mashup of all three. Pepys increasingly resorted to this home-brewed polyglot whenever the subject of sex came up, which was often. Indeed, sex – chasing it, having it, worrying about getting it again – dominated Pepys’s waking life and haunted his dreams, many of them nightmares. Putting these anguished passages in a garbled form not only lessened the chance of servants snooping, but also served to protect him from his own abiding sense of shame. As an extra layer of concealment, Pepys wrote “my Journall” using tachygraphy, an early form of shorthand.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully […]

She’d always, The Student, underlined in her books, dog- eared the pages. It was as if without these markings she couldn’t understand what was written, couldn’t feel the words alive in her mind. The blueblack liquid corralled, as it dried, the text into something concentrated, something a bit her own. A garden drying in the […]

The sun was half bright, half warm, half full. It was a morning in August and it was cold. I’d made the mistake of using a damp towel to seal the gap under the bedroom window, and now the fabric had frozen solid. I must’ve caught a cold, because I’d woken up with a stuffed […]

Aaron Boehmer examines the hope in human connection and Octavia Butler’s “speech sounds.” | Lit Hub Criticism What Jane Austen’s most mundane possessions reveal about her literary (and life) ethos. | Lit Hub Biography Nell Stevens on a 19th-century scandal and the exploration of different worlds through fiction: “There is something utopian about the possibilities […]

Summer isn’t only about beach reads, and really, you can read anything you want on the beach. Titles being released this July include books weighty in content, size, or both, and below are just a few. This short list of fiction and nonfiction features narratives that leave their unique mark on the past, spanning the lives of the Romantic poets, World War I, the Salvadoran civil war, and 1980s London. Follow our coverage of some of these and many other recommended reads in our digital magazine.

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What makes a classic a classic? Many of what we consider classics today seemed out of place when they were first published. Some books are assigned the title “classic” long after the fact, and some are deemed “instant classics." Our interactions with so-called classics—the ways we discuss, teach, and package works of significance—define them and keep them alive. Publishers play a crucial part in this process, and some go the extra mile when it comes to shedding new light on old books, introducing underappreciated writing to a modern audience, or simply creating beautiful updated editions. Below are some imprints and series focusing on established, overlooked, and freshly dubbed classics bound (no pun intended) ... [More]

In 1865, a British man who was working as a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia, contacted a wealthy English family to announce himself as their long-lost heir. Roger Tichborne, an aristocrat, had been presumed drowned after a shipwreck in 1854, though his mother refused to accept his death and spent years searching for him, sending […]

The Pulitzer-winning critic has some choice words for the likes of Zadie Smith, Hanya Yanagihara and Bret Easton Ellis

Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. “It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument”, she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Long Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes “all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors”, and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a “pernicious form of commodity fetishism”. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness.

This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Long Chu diagnoses a case of “Munchausen by proxy” in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by “the misery principle”: “horrible things happen to people for no reason”, and the author is “a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health”. She notes a troubling tendency towards “infantile” idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin’s autofiction, and finds “something deeply juvenile” about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels. Moshfegh’s medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because “You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie”; “the leading coprophile of American letters” is trying too hard to convince us she’s not a prude.

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.

Small things can be almost sacred, as is Fanny Price’s “nest of comforts,” assembled out of bits and pieces in the old schoolroom at Mansfield Park—a faded footstool, a collection of family silhouettes, a sketch of her brother’s ship; objects none of which is considered good enough for display elsewhere. Or they can be slippery, […]

A clear-eyed account of a difficult, complex man and his self-inflicted fall from grace

The last shah of Iran was a figure from Shakespearean tragedy: outwardly haughty and magnificent, inwardly insecure and indecisive, a Persian Richard II, self-regarding even in his own downfall. When he stood at the foot of his aircraft steps as he left Iran for the last time in January 1979, tears streaming down his cheeks and killer cancer working away inside him, surely even the stoniest heart must have felt some pity for this fallen autocrat?

Not so. The stony heart of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini contained only rage and a desire for vengeance towards the King of Kings (the Iranian monarch’s official designation). “This man has no place in Iran, and no place on Earth,” Khomeini told me in a chilling television interview before leaving Paris for Tehran. On the plane bringing him back from a 15-year exile a few days later to overthrow the shah’s regime, Khomeini muttered that he felt nothing – hichi – on returning home.

Whether you’re planning for a vacation, a staycation, or just enjoying the warm days ahead, we’re here to help you map out your summer reading. Splash into the summer spirit with absorbing beach reads, stories that evoke the season, and books for letting your mind relax and unfurl. And don’t worry, unlike in a certain AI-generated summer reading list, these are all real books we chose ourselves that actually exist (or will soon). Plus, these titles have been recently featured or are scheduled to be featured in our digital magazine, so you can peruse our reviews and “beyond the book” articles along with them.

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Passion by David Morley; Versus Versus edited by Rachael Boast; So What by Frederick Seidel; In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles; Transfigurations by Jay Wright

Passion by David Morley (Carcanet, £12.99)
David Morley’s ardent, vividly alive latest collection draws on his Romany background and knowledge as an ecologist and naturalist. The poems weave the dynamism of the Romany language with English to celebrate our intimacy with the natural world’s vast mystery and beauty: “from elm top to hedgerow … from harebell to whitethroat: / Sorí simensar sí men, / Sorí simensar sí men.” (We are all one.) This evocative braid of language is also used to consider the aching cruelty of oppression – “The gavvers kettle the Travellers on the market square. / The locals stand by gawking, piss-taking” – as well as the defiant, quicksilver power of Romany language and community. “Nouns grew spry and spring-heeled /… words which Travellers / might ride, or hide behind from hard law /… But spoken language moves / like meltwater under ice. Speech thaws into life.”

Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets, edited by Rachael Boast (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
This anthology is a dizzying, continent-crossing explosion of verse, its topics and styles as individual as the poets; revelling in the diversity of a community that is often boxed in by ableism and prejudice. A potent theme of resisting limits courses through the book. Lateef McLeod’s poem pushes back against others’ definitions: “I am too pretty for your Ugly Laws, / too smooth to be shut in”, while Mishka Hoosen’s work celebrates the power and agency of those who think and live differently: “I am that howl / in the night ward. I am electric / without your help.” In a period in the UK when disabled people’s rights and living conditions are under threat, this collection feels timely. As Maya Abu-Hayyat suggests: “They will fall in the end, / those who say you can’t.”

Got your towels and sunscreen ready? How about your summer reading? Here are some books to start the season right: a reflective memoir about relationships and selfhood, a fantasy imagining a world where doors lead to unpredictable fates, an ambitious story of identity in America, and a darkly funny novel set in modern Ukraine. Follow along with upcoming coverage in our digital magazine.

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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”.

As the film of Deborah Levy’s novel Hot Milk is released, author Abigail Bergstrom explores the literary fascination with inaccessible, emotionally distant maternal figures

‘My love for my mother is like an axe,” the narrator of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk tells us. “It cuts very deep”. Set in the Spanish coastal city of Almería, the book – which has now been made into a film starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey – is a sun-drenched unravelling of a daughter tethered to her ailing mother.

Hot Milk fits into a growing canon of literature exploring the absent, or fading, or otherwise inaccessible mother – stories in which the maternal figure is pulled to the edge of the frame, so that the daughter can take centre stage. Books such as Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms and First Love, both featuring mother-daughter relationships marked by emotional distance and strained communication.Or The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, where the protagonist, Leda, is both unseen daughter and deserting mother, a collision that unleashes emotional chaos.