Andrew Hill selects his best mid-year reads
Clive Cookson selects his best mid-year reads
As the global movement of people prompts hardline approaches by populists and policymakers, four new books explore the west’s struggle to balance domestic pressures with the plight of asylum-seekers
Trouble at the border; dark humour in gothic tale Brat; the radical history of suburban gardening; what the Capetians and Plantagenets did for us; a new novel from Joseph O’Neill; the heroine of the Underground Railroad; social unrest in Chile; a pilgrim in search of Dostoyevsky’s soul — plus the best new environment titles
The Canadian is not afraid to tackle serious subjects and big ideas
Two books shed new light on the dynasties that laid the foundations of the modern European nation
Leonid Tsypkin’s newly reissued novel fuses Soviet-inflected nostalgia with a biography of the great Russian writer
A weird and raucous novel about living and dying
A quest to find a brilliant and elusive African soccer player forms the backdrop to O’Neill’s globetrotting novel
Social ills and unrest in modern-day Chile play out in a tense and tragic story of a put-upon domestic worker
Michael Gilson’s tribute to 20th-century English gardening, its role in social change — and its forgotten hero
Designer diamonds, luxury yachts and hallucinogenic toads all feature in Kevin Kwan’s latest novel
Tiya Miles revisits the pivotal achievements of a woman who helped dozens escape slavery via the Underground Railroad
New titles include billionaire climate investor Tom Steyer on a way of life we can all pursue and a meditative take on nature’s resilience
Gallerist John Kasmin has been shooting pictures of the artist since 1961. Now he’s got a show of his own
The physical and emotional weights we bear tell stories about our values, fears and longings
Three new books on China help bring definition to the emerging economic contours of cold war 2.0
This year’s much-anticipated Summer Books series is almost upon us — and, as ever, we want to hear from you
Carola Binder’s monetary history uncovers the deep entanglement of price rises and politics
A portrait of the figures from Benn to Corbyn who made waves in the party but often put protest before power
When we acquire a painting surely we are asking, where could I put that? Where would it fit? Does it go with the sofa?
’Pemi Aguda’s short stories evoke the chaos, smells, corruption and supernatural influences in Nigeria’s biggest city
A bracing tale of the cultural clash between arts and politics that still resonates today
An intriguing and provocative apocalyptic tale loosely inspired by ‘King Lear’
Four stories about authorship and identity within the visual arts are interspersed with observations from a shape-shifting narrator
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