The Telegraph5 hours agoThe sinister truth about The Great GatsbyThe Telegraph - Erica WagnerThe Great Gatsby has a claim to be the novel of the American century. When it was published in 1925, “Silent Cal” Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, the stock market was booming, the Ku Klux Klan was thriving, and a biology teacher from Tennessee called John T Scopes was tried …
The Telegraph9 hours agoThis memoir from an ex-Taliban fighter is astonishingThe Telegraph - Frances Wilson“When I was 16, I wanted to become a suicide bomber for the Taliban in Afghanistan.” This must be the strongest opening sentence of any memoir of the 21st century, and the following 300 pages do not disappoint. Delusions of Paradise is the story of how and why Maiwand Banayee was brainwashed into …
The Telegraph1 day agoForget internet feminism – this novel grasps real women’s livesThe Telegraph - Lucy ScholesCautery is the debut novel by Lucía Lijtmaer – a writer, journalist and cultural critic who was born in Argentina but raised in Barcelona – and also the first of her books (the rest of which have been essays and non-fiction) to be published in English. It begins in its author’s adopted city. We’re …
The TelegraphThe best poetry books of 2025 so farThe Telegraph - Declan Ryan. , Tim Keane. , Rishi Dastidar. , Sophie HaigneyApril: Wellwater by Karen Solie “There is no going back,” Karen Solie writes in “Red Spring”, a controlled explosion of a poem about the ruination of farmland by selfish corporations (in this case, the chemicals giant Bayer). As a phrase, it might stand as the refrain for Wellwater, the Canadian …
The Telegraph2 days agoThis book is Japan’s answer to Brave New WorldThe Telegraph - Claire AllfreeThe Japanese author Sayaka Murata has become a pin-up novelist for Gen Z readers thanks to her consumable, droll dystopias about social misfits, the overload of reality and the consolations the digital sphere might offer. Her breakthrough novel, Convenience Store Woman, published in English in …
The Telegraph3 days agoShakespeare’s fairies descend into civil war in a magical new novelThe Telegraph - Emily BearnOberon and Titania’s quarrel over the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of literature’s most infamous custody disputes: “Why should Titania cross her Oberon?” the fairy king pleads. “I do but beg a little changeling boy, / To be my henchman.” The queen eventually caves in, and …
