Books

Trump and co like to imagine the Arctic as empty, silent and ripe for the taking. In fact it is noisy, political and increasingly angry

The American-Asian artist’s brutal killing ended a life of huge promise – but her voice could not be silenced

Mysteries, misdiagnoses and miracles marked the extraordinary life of New Zealand’s greatest writer. Yet she remains oddly undercelebrated in her own land

The great crime writer, who died 50 years ago, may have looked in later life like Miss Marple – but in her youth she was an intrepid world traveller with a passion for surfing

Chloé Zhao’s film is deeply felt and beautifully made – but misses the essence of what made the playwright so great

Every new year, we swear we’ll start anew – but literature shows we never really can

Maria Semple, Catherine Newman and Jennette McCurdy are among the writers with books to look out for in 2026

Crime, corruption and cruelty show how leaders like Trump and Bukele exploit power, and why they must be stopped

The former deputy prime minister is following her ambitious colleague Wes Streeting in penning an autobiography

The country’s wartime tradition of giving novels has become a key part of the season

The Holy City was extracting money from tourists even when Mark Twain visited in 1867

Our writers on their cultural highlights of the year

In Barcelona, key sites from the fight against Franco remain, but their memory has been wiped clean

A hit job on Keir Starmer does no one any favours – but shows how the party’s old grievances have led to its failure in power

The journalist who had an affair with RFK Jr while profiling him writes beautifully. But letting a vaccine-sceptic loon off the hook is inexcusable

At 86, the author has finally written a memoir, and it’s everything you’d want it to be

An account of the BBC Bashir scandal shows it could only have happened to a family mired in paranoid plotting

The chancellor recognises the power of getting children to read - now she must convince the parents

Being right or wrong is not as important as what you do in the service of those opinions and how far you are willing to go

Leonard Woolf’s The Barbarians At The Gate warns that tyranny begins not with tanks in the streets, but with compassion being turned off in the public mind

The writer coined the word ‘enshittification’ to describe how useful tech inevitably gets worse. Now he’s turning his sights on AI

Joyce Carol Oates’s brutal dismissal of the world’s richest man has enraged him – and reminded us of her own brilliance

Avant-garde writer Claire Louise Bennett’s new novel is an otherworldly hymn to minutiae

Thirteen years after the ‘punk prayer’ that saw her jailed, Maria Alyokhina’s new book details how the art collective continues the fight against Putin

Write to letters@thenewworld.co.uk to have your views voiced in the magazine

From Helsinki to Buenos Aires, one man’s obsession with the art and architecture of our underground railways

Lessing wrote not about poverty, but literary poverty – what happens when eager minds are deprived of books

Middleland is part elegy, part memoir – and reveals the isolation of a politician too thoughtful for his time

Nick Trend’s new book explores the places where Giotto and Leonardo constructed a country’s heritage

This film is a fine addition to Daniel Day-Lewis’s body of work, one of the greatest in cinema

As Cop30 approaches, apocalyptic visions look more everyday than ever

In this age of rage, books restore to us what algorithms have removed – the ability to think as others think