Books

Benjamin Markovits’s Booker-longlisted The Rest of Our Lives wants us to cheer on a tedious man’s journey of self-discovery. I loathed every moment

A crime writer’s memoir goes from New Jersey to Venice via Iran and LA – and features an apology to her most famous character

Book festivals, ragebait journalism and city boys in the country get eviscerated in Natasha Brown’s brilliant Universality

New York in the 1980s was riven by disharmony, corruption and excess. Jonathan Mahler’s new book explains how the city forged a would-be dictator

A selection of New World writers and editors choose the books they can’t stop recommending

Tension is simmering as the two countries celebrate their independence days this week. Four books explore how their relationship curdled into conflict

What do Patrick Süskind’s classic and Asako Yuzuki's contemporary novel tell us about the philosophy of smell and taste?

From Perfection and Careless People to Stephen King and Katie Price, your summer reading is sorted

Thanks to Trump, the convicted sex offender is getting more consideration than her and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims ever did

Oprah Winfrey made me love Wally Lamb. But with The River is Waiting for Me, the spark has gone

An unashamed member of the educated liberal elite, he parlayed his wit and access into a career of TV interviews and debates

A book that goes from Berlin to Bogotá on a hallucinatory walk through space, time, and memory

The spy turned novelist arrived in search of new plots and left with an understanding that eludes some natives

Chechen human rights investigator Natalia Estemirova defied Russia - and was killed. Now her daughter is keeping her fight alive

Rosamund Pike delivers a quite astonishing performance as a Crown Court Judge wrestling with the legal system's shoddy handling of sexual assault cases

Calleja is part of a new, very different generation of translators, as her experimental memoir makes clear

Eight years after his death, a reissue of Kitchen Confidential still burns with wit and rage

A mission to read the complete works in chronological order reveals unexpected joys and an antidote to theatrical woes

It’s just the latest in a long line of books that weren’t what they seemed

A new book captures the enduring confusion of that moment when love goes away

Lena Dunham’s first major television project since Girls is so much more than the romcom it's billed as

The German-American went from a sniper to an academic with a reputation for sexual frankness

The world of extremism has moved on during the past 100 years – but the core ideas of Hitler’s book have not gone away

Her autobiography shows that the western queen of the far right is almost impossible to pin down

Miffy is Dick Bruna’s most famous creation, selling over 85 million books. But the beloved bunny is only a small part of the story

American journalist John Cassidy explains why those who despise this unstable system seem doomed to failure

A new book of Polish short stories reveals the inventive mischievousness of the nation’s writers

The place where Goethe’s antihero sold his soul has embraced the maxim: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’

The book accolade turns 30 this year and I have it to thank for many of the incredible women - and novels - in my life

Her nasty new book contains one interesting point – funny the Daily Mail chose to ignore it

American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi thinks woke protesters are sincere – but they’re equally committed to being wealthy

Thirty years after it was first published to indifference, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is a literary sensation