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New Statesman
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The best summer reads 2025
Illustration by Eiko Ojara Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Doctor Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold The story of how in 1910, Dr Crippen murdered his wife, fled with his lover on an ocean liner, was caught using a transatlantic telegram, and was tried and hanged, is pure penny dreadful sensation. Hallie Rubenhold's deft study looks at the personnel involved in the drama and the backstories, by turns nondescript, seedy and startling, that led them to tragedy. Read our review here. Doubleday, 512pp, £25. Buy the book A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi There are seven Kinga Sikoras, or seven versions of her – including a matchmaker, a perfumier and a window cleaner – and each keeps a diary informing the other Kingas of what she got up to. The latest novel from Helen Oyeyemi is a dizzyingly funny narrative, where slapstick surrounds a central mystery. But the story's crowning jewel is her ability to create seven unique voices belonging to one individual. Read our review here. Faber & Faber, 256pp, £16.99. Buy the book Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland Just a single copy of Suetonius's short but vivid biographies of the Caesars had been preserved in a Frankish monastery, yet it became the model for how to write about powerful rulers for succeeding generations. Tom Holland's exemplary translation of this collection shows how strikingly modern they are in their mix of personal details, politics and power. Read an excerpt from the book here. Penguin Classics, 448pp, £25. Buy the book Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo In her feminist reimagining of Moby-Dick, the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted author Xiaolu Guo follows a similar plotline to Herman Melville's great novel, but with a slightly changed cast, including Ishmaelle, a 17-year-old girl who takes the identity of a 15-year-old boy. Guo deftly incorporates philosophical questions about our relationship with nature and gender dysphoria into the plot, with affecting results. Read our review here. Chatto & Windus, 448pp, £18.99. Buy the book Malick Sidibé's Painted Frames: the Malian photographer's portraits of African modernity, reframed as social and cultural objects. Photo by Malick Sidibé 2025 courtesy Loose Joints Peak Human by Johan Norberg The decline of all great civilisations is cyclical, notes Johan Norberg in Peak Human, yet inevitably another great dynasty seems always to emerge from the wake of previous eras. Norberg views history through seven 'golden ages', ranging from Ancient Greece to the Anglosphere by way of the Renaissance and Song China. However familiar the territory may be, he manages to place something surprising at every turn. Read our review here. Atlantic, 512pp, £22. Buy the book Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt The British-Irish writer Seán Hewitt has won awards and acclaim for his first two collections of poetry. Now, he publishes a mature and complete debut novel. It is a sore and delicate love story about two teenage boys in a fictional northern village. Hewitt's poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship is revealed with a light, sensitive touch, and reaches impressive emotional depths. Read our review here. Jonathan Cape, 240pp, £16.99. Buy the book The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, were responsible for the most disturbing collection of fairy stories ever published. Their tales were not just entertainment, for children and for adults, but a means by which to preserve both the German language and its folk past. Compiled in the age of Romantic nationalism, the stories are united by their strangeness and brutality, according to Ann Schmiesing. Read our review here. Yale University Press, 360pp, £25. Buy the book Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Don't Forget We're Here Forever by Lamorna Ash How younger generations are confronting and embracing religion is the focus of Lamorna Ash's study of contemporary faith. Sparked by two of her friends who converted, she combines her personal religious journey with interviews with people who have redefined their understanding of Christianity or are turning to it for the first time, as well as visits to Quaker meetings and Jesuit retreats. Read our review here. Bloomsbury Circus, 352pp, £22. Buy the book Beartooth by Callan Wink The characters of Callum Wink's highly readable second novel are Thad and Hazen, two young Montana brothers who begin to discover new things about themselves, and each other, after an injury. The book is at once thoroughly wild and thoroughly intimate. The modest poetry of Callan's prose does justice both to the beauty of the wilderness and to the complexity of the brothers' relationship. Read our review here. Granta, 256pp, £14.99. Buy the book Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children by Barbara Demick Drawing on the story of two identical twins separated between China and the US as infants, Barbara Demick shows the dark side of China's international adoption programme. In it, many babies were taken from the arms of their parents by government officials and trafficked. Chinese bureaucracy remains opaque, with affected families still unable to find their children. Read our review here. Granta, 336pp, £20. Buy the book Zed Nelson's The Anthropocene Illusion: visualising the environmental cost of human development. Photo by Zed Nelson Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War by Minoo Dinshaw This fine work of narrative history follows the careers of two friends who found themselves on opposite sides during the English Civil War – the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke and the royalist Edward Hyde (the future Earl of Clarendon). They met as students and both worked within their respective parties to temper extremism, later writing accounts of their turbulent times. Read our review here. Allen Lane, 544pp, £30. Buy the book A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis – selected and introduced by John Hatt Norman Lewis is best known for his wartime memoir Naples '44. However, much of his other writing, suffused with deadpan humour, where beauty and absurdity sit side by side, deserves wider recognition. This selection of 36 pieces takes in everything from an encounter with bandits in Guatemala to conversations with Cossack prisoners of war facing death. Read our review here. Eland, 504pp, £25. Buy the book Underdogs: The Truth About Britain's White Working Class by Joel Budd When did the working class become racialised? In classical Marxist scholarship, it didn't need to be – the working class was generally assumed to be white. But with mass immigration, a new category, the 'white working class', has been invented. Joel Budd's mixture of reportage, travelogue and enquiry is one of the most searching studies into this contested subcategory yet. Read our review here. PanMacmillan, 336pp, £20. Buy the book The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British 20th Century by Owen Hatherley Owen Hatherley's new book is a history of the central-European émigrés who fled fascism in the 1930s, from Ernst Gombrich to Ernő Goldfinger. If you've ever picked up an orange Penguin paperback, taken a walk down the South Bank or moaned about the Trellick Tower, you've registered how they transformed Britain. Read our review here. Allen Lane, 608pp, £35. Buy the book The Boys by Leo Robson Staff at the New Statesman love to see a former colleague graduate from book critic to book author. It is even more pleasing to see the book in question receive wall-to-wall praise. With a large canvas (London at the time of the 2012 Olympics), and a small cast (centred on two brothers attempting reconciliation after life has separated them), Robson has pulled off a tricky career swerve. Read our review here. Riverrun, 304pp, £16.99. Buy the book Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Affordable housing, infrastructure and climate crisis action: these are things we all want, so why do we never get them? Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's book is a galvanising attack on the over-regulation of the US economy, which could be applied to Britain too. This is an argument that has too often been made by the right; the authors point the way towards a progressive developmentalism. Profile, 304pp, £16.99. Buy the book Malaparte: A Biography by Maurizio Serra, translated by Stephen Twilley 'Malaparte' is such a perfect name for a laureate of violence and fascism that it's a shame it was invented – by Kurt Suckert. It means 'bad side' in Italian and this biography reveals a writer whose travelogues, written while following the Eastern Front of the Second World War, are evidence of the 'bad side' of humanity he saw with grim clarity. Read our review here. New York Review of Books, 736pp, $39.95 Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi The collector and Picassophile Douglas Cooper was not a nice man (acid tongued, bitchy, prickly) but he was an interesting one. He befriended – and fell out with – many of the greatest artists of the mid-20th century, was a wartime Monuments Man, and art historian and proselytiser with a sometimes dangerous gay lifestyle. Read the review here. Yale University Press, 592pp, £45. Buy the book [See also: Kemi Badenoch isn't working] Related
Spectator
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Wake up, babe, new Dot Wordsworth just dropped
On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: 'babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped'. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It turned out to have been put together with the help of an online device called Penguin Classics Cover Generator, which allows you to use your chosen picture to design a paperback. The site has no connection with Penguin. But 'Wake up, babe, new [something] just dropped' is a catchphrase or meme that has been around since 2020. Drop, a verb favoured by the trendy to mean 'arrive' or 'be published or released' has been used since the 1980s for records, but is still thought to be hip. Drop is having a creative time at the moment. People who use X are worried about drop shipping. Handy gadgets are advertised for sale, but the advertiser doesn't stock the dog-toy, or whatever the thing is. He merely gets a supplier (perhaps in China) to deliver it to the buyer and makes money from his mark-up as middle-man. Another thing that drops is the other shoe, for which we wait. 'Waiting for the other shoe to drop' must date from the advent of flat-living, and expresses the suspense with which downstairs neighbours await the next percussion after the warning shot, as the man upstairs prepares for bed. There is no recognised begetter of the phrase. It became popular between the wars, when Pont's cartoon 'Life in the flat above' showed the family upstairs jumping and thumping, with the daughter pulling a little wagon unstably piled with pots and pans and even the dog wearing boots. The indefatigably reliable Michael Quinion in his World Wide Words blog traced an American quotation from 1921: 'If nine out of ten of us hadn't heard that 'drop that other shoe' chestnut and molded our lives accordingly for the sake of the neighbor below us, what would be the end of us?' Today, I think we've seen what.
Japan Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
Truth is slippery in ‘Suspicion,' a detective story based on a true crime
A spare, deceptively candid novella, Seicho Matsumoto's 'Suspicion' is as much about crime as it is about truth, human bias and belief. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood and out this month from Penguin Classics, it is Kirkwood's second Matsumoto translation, after the acclaimed 'Tokyo Express' in 2022. Matsumoto (1909-1992), winner of both the Akutagawa Prize and the Kikuchi Kan Prize, didn't publish his first novel until he was 40. Yet he quickly established himself as a master of Japanese crime fiction, publishing over 30 detective novels, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction works on both modern and ancient Japanese history. Suspicion, by Seicho Matsumoto. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood. 112 pages, PENGUIN CLASSICS, fiction. In his novels, Matsumoto frequently focuses on social crime and psychological thrillers. 'Suspicion' satisfies on both counts despite its unique spin. Although an undisputed tragedy has occurred, with a suspect and various layers of unfolding conjecture, the novella is not a crime novel in the traditional sense. It instead emerges most clearly as an allegory on the various pursuits of truth —– and what humans will do in their determined search to reveal it. Originally published in 1982, the novella was the basis for an award-winning Japanese film of the same name that year and has further inspired five different TV adaptations. The story, however, was already familiar to the public at the time, being loosely based on an infamous real-life crime. In 1974, what is known as 'the Beppu 300 million yen insurance murder' rocked Japan. On a Sunday night in November, two children and their mother drowned after their car crashed off a ferry dock and plunged into the sea in Beppu, Oita Prefecture. The woman's newly wed husband, Torami Araki, an ex-convict who adopted both her name and children, managed to escape the car. Insisting his wife had been driving, Araki was the only survivor of the crash. Suspicion soon arose when it was discovered the man had recently taken out several different insurance policies on his new wife and her two youngest children. After appearing on a live TV talk show to protest his innocence, Araki was arrested backstage for the murders and insurance fraud. In 'Suspicion,' Matsumoto keeps the basics of this infamous case but changes the husband to a beautiful woman at the center of his story, Kumako Onizuka. She is a former Tokyo hostess and petty grifter with connections to the yakuza. Her new spouse, Fukutaro Shirakawa, is a wealthy, widowed landowner from the countryside. With these simple changes, Matsumoto immediately heightens the uncertainty, playing on the obvious gender stereotypes of the gold-digging city bride and the hapless, older man from the countryside. Even innocent hobbies like her swimming are used to underscore suspicions that she planned the car crashing in the sea. As an outsider to the local community, Onizuka is instantly labeled a femme fatale and quickly convicted in the local press, weeks before she is arrested. In 'Suspicion,' we never hear directly from Onizuka — only from the men surrounding her. She vehemently protests her own innocence and insists her husband was driving the car when it plummeted off the dock and into the sea. Seicho Matsumoto, a master of Japanese crime fiction and a prolific writer, only published his first work at age 40. | PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIMEDIA However, more than merely the guilt or innocence of Onizuka, Matsumoto examines other perspectives on truth and its very nature. For instance, the actions of Moichi Akitani, a local reporter, make the reader doubt journalistic integrity. Being convinced Onizuka is guilty, Akitani builds his reputation on scathing but methodically researched articles on Onizuka, helping to spread the notoriety of the case nationwide. Seizing on her seductive beauty and unusual name — it contains the kanji for 'demon' — Akitani unearths suspicious details of her past in Tokyo, adding these tidbits to the circumstantial evidence against her. Akitani also manipulates similarities to a real life Taisho Era (1912-26) murder case, referenced in the novel as the 'Onikuma Incident,' to further sensationalize the case. On the other side, Matsumoto also includes the views of the various defense lawyers associated with Onizuka's case. Masao Harayama is a seasoned veteran suffering from liver disease. Despite his failing health, Harayama is determined to provide the best defense possible to the accused. There's also Kanetaka Okamura, a hotshot Tokyo attorney, who flies into the area to consider joining the team. A speedy, thought-provoking read, by the end, Matsumoto cleverly offers a final, philosophical twist: How far are we willing to go in pursuing an objective truth? And how much does our individual perspective on truth become our own identity?
Irish Examiner
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Karl Whitney: Opening a world to books that beg to be unearthed
In Colm Tóibín's introduction to a beautiful new edition of Henry James' Washington Square (published in April by Manderley Press), he sketches the lost New York of the author's childhood over a few paragraphs, outlines the relationship between that world and the book you're about to read over a few paragraphs — and then it's over. It's a sharp introduction that doesn't outstay its welcome. I asked Rebeka Russell of Manderley Press, who commissioned Tóibín, what she looks for in an introduction. It should bring 'something fresh and alluring to the table — in effect it needs to appeal to new readers and satisfy those who already have a good understanding of the novel'. 'Every book on the Manderley Press list is deeply influenced by a building, place, city or landmark,' Russell tells me, and the introductions she commissions often seek to gauge 'the effect of location on the author'. Tóibín's introduction is tightly focused, concentrates on place, in line with Manderley's ethos, and gives the reader just enough to pique their interest. I've seen relatively short books dwarfed by introductory materials and explanatory footnotes. Sometimes it's necessary: The book might be 2,000 years old and needs significant context and explanation if it's to be understood by a contemporary reader. At other times it's not: The notes tend towards over-explanation, and it can be difficult for the annotator to know where to stop. There's a balance to be struck. Does a classic need an introduction? Often it does, simply to impart some biographical information and set the scene for an uninitiated reader who might be coming to the author's work for the first time. Does it need notes? Not always. And, if it does, maybe five to 10 pages of notes might suffice. Another aspect to consider is that lots of classics are out of copyright, and therefore freely available for anyone to print without paying royalties. What makes your edition of a book distinctive in a potentially crowded marketplace is the quality of the materials you add: The introduction, footnotes, and the cover (you'd be surprised by how many people — even, or perhaps especially, in the publishing industry — judge a book by its cover). For a couple of years, I worked as an editor at Penguin Classics. A significant part of my job was commissioning introductions. Over time, older introductions, perhaps written in the 1960s or '70s, had remained in print but were now due for a second look. Other introductions had been removed and never replaced. My job was to identify the right person to act as an introducer, tracking them down by reading the latest research on a particular author, watching videos of academic conferences, or listening to podcasts about a book or an author. This gave me an idea of the current research on, say, F Scott Fitzgerald or Franz Kafka, and a list of names of potential introducers. The process prompted me to think about the way we discover books — and how that discovery is shaped by others. Sometimes it's as direct and obvious as an introduction that orients us in a way of reading the book it precedes. At other times, an enthusiastic review will send us to the bookshop. Occasionally a bad review that we believe to be unfair will have us buying a book in solidarity with the author. Then there are the moments when, browsing in a bookshop, we stumble across a book we like the sound of. We may never have heard of it before and take a chance. Sometimes these are the books that we end up loving the most. The basement of Hodges Figgis on Dawson St in Dublin has long been a source of bargain books — not second hand but remaindered: The piles of books that remain in stock when bookshops have sold all they think they can of a title and publishers don't want to keep them in the warehouse anymore. Some get sold cheaply, others get pulped (as an author it's difficult not to take this aspect of the trade personally). Certain bookshops sell a significant amount of remaindered books; others don't get involved in that side of things, preferring to concentrate on new books and top-selling backlist (older books kept in print). For years, I haunted the basement of Hodges Figgis and the many secondhand bookshops that, at that time, dotted Dublin's city centre. This was before the online trade in secondhand books really kicked in and rising rents made it less sensible to have a business full of mouldering paper waiting for book pervs to wander in, searching for oddball masterpieces. Fortuitous encounter with a book unknown to you But there's still a lot to be said for a fortuitous encounter with a book that was hitherto unknown to you. I can think of plenty of examples. I'm a fan of the films of the Marx Brothers, and for a while, I kept an eye out for books by a humorist called SJ Perelman, who co-wrote a couple of Marx Brothers films (including one of the best, Horse Feathers), and who had been a writer for The New Yorker. While browsing the shelves, I noticed two other names where I expected Perelman to reside: Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a Spanish novelist who I never investigated further (although I understand that his books involve a lot of fencing), and a French writer called Georges Perec, whose playful and brilliant work became deeply familiar to me. I went on to write about Perec's work, visiting his archives in Paris. His writing, especially his work about the French capital, came to influence my own work. Somewhere in my files, I have a letter from his niece, granting me permission to view his archives. All because he happened to be in the place where I expected Perelman to be. Another discovery took place in the basement of Hodges Figgis: A non-fiction book called The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan. The subject grabbed me immediately: An exploration of the strange interzone of wetlands, warehouses, and industrial yards that sit on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, within view of Manhattan but a world away. The playfulness of Sullivan's approach made a deep impression on me, first as a reader but, eventually, as a writer too. Serious but also fun, it made me want to write my own books, to read more of what he had written, and to investigate the authors who had influenced him — which led me to read John McPhee's The Pine Barrens and Ian Frazier's Great Plains. Both Perec and Sullivan were important influences, and both were encountered by chance. I can't say that I immediately changed the way I wrote or what I was writing about, but eventually both shaped the extent of my ambition — of what I thought was possible. When I read about people 'discovering' and republishing 'lost classics', I often think: Well, they were in print once. Someone believed in them, shepherded the work to publication, and it succeeded or failed based on the whims of the market. I wasn't the first person to stumble across Georges Perec. Translators played a big part in putting those books on the shelves. The academic David Bellos and others such as the journalist John Sturrock translated his work from the original French in the 1980s and '90s. An editor at Granta bought The Meadowlands from its American publisher and published it into the British and Irish market. Books sit on the shelves until we are ready for them. But we're not discovering them, not really: They've been put there by others in the hope of introducing them into our lives.
Spectator
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Did Terry Pratchett really write classics?
The news that Terry Pratchett's 2002 novel Night Watch has joined the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics series may seem, to the Pratchett uninitiated, something of an eyebrow-raiser. Penguin has proudly announced that the book 'which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is… a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit' and that it was 'written at the height of Pratchett's imaginative powers'. All this may very well be true. But many people, even those millions well disposed towards Pratchett, might be asking another question: why this book, and why now? During his lifetime, Pratchett built on the legacy of another great British fantastical author, Douglas Adams, by creating his own universe, Discworld, in which many of his books are set. They have sold over 80 million copies, and even Pratchett's death in 2015 has done little to stem the enthusiasm. At one point, he was the most shoplifted author in Britain, so desperate were his teenaged admirers to get their hands on his stories. And his books have mostly remained books rather than being transformed into big-budget Hollywood spectacles. Pratchett once said that a film studio was interested but he was told to 'lose the Death angle', which would be tricky, given that Death is a major recurring character throughout the series. I've always enjoyed the Pratchett books and consider him one of the more amiable and less self-consciously literary knighted authors that Britain has produced. The writer Imogen West-Knights summed up Pratchett's admirers as she searched for a description of a certain kind of Briton: English, Terry Pratchett fan, sardonic humour, left wing-ish, leather jackets, maybe long hair, maybe folk music, Bill Bailey, real ale, usually middle age+. Warhammer adjacent. Likes swords but doesn't necessarily own one? If I have any disagreement with his elevation to the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics, then, it is less to do with Pratchett's own writing and more a sense of uncertainty as to what defines a modern classic. There is no stated definition on Penguin's website, and when I interviewed Henry Eliot, the former creative editor of Penguin Classics, a few years ago, he told me that: 'The Modern Classics series gathers the greatest books of more recent times, books that have challenged convention, changed the world or created something new. They are books that speak powerfully to the moment – and time will tell if they speak for more than that.' I would argue that Night Watch, although a book loved by Pratchett's many fans, is hardly something that 'challenges convention' or has 'changed the world'. Pratchett created something new in his Discworld series, and the love that his admirers hold for his works is testament to their enduring success. Personally I was surprised that Penguin didn't opt to publish 1987's Mort, the first Discworld novel to feature Death and the one usually regarded as Pratchett's single greatest achievement, or simply to come out with the entire series of Discworld books in one go. Pratchett was always a self-effacing figure and would probably have shrugged at the Classics label There are many deep-pocketed admirers of the author who would have ordered the entire canon in this new edition, although I can imagine that the effort involved in putting together 40-something painstakingly annotated novels may have been exhausting. This Penguin Classics edition also includes a foreword by Pratchett's PA and biographer Rob Wilkins, and an introduction and annotated notes by two Terry-o-philes, Trinity College Dublin's Dr Darryl Jones and the University of South Australia's Dr David Lloyd. Despite all that effort in making Night Watch appear to be a classic, even Pratchett would not have claimed that every one of the books was a masterpiece. Yet the nature of Penguin Modern Classics is that when they go all in on an author, they generally have to publish the entire works. Which means, for instance, that Evelyn Waugh's wildly unsuccessful Catholic fantasia Helena must be given the same serious literary treatment as the far more deserving A Handful of Dust. If Night Watch is successful – and only a fool would think that it won't be – then presumably there will be more Discworld editions over the coming years. Pratchett was always a self-effacing figure and would probably have shrugged at the Classics label (although he was evangelical about the fantasy genre, which he argued was done down by snobbish literary critics). Yet I can't help thinking that Penguin has done something similar to what the Folio Society has been doing over the past few years, and published a book that they know will cater to a fervent fanbase and sell in considerable quantities thanks to the added material. The question of literary excellence therefore becomes a secondary one. This is understandable – it's fine – but the brand is called Penguin Modern Classics, rather than Penguin Modern Notables. I am unconvinced that this particular instalment in the much-loved series lives up to its grandiose billing it.
