Whether you’re jetting off to Bali, hopping on the Eurostar to the Continent or planning a staycation to make the most of our balmy British summer, you’re going to want a holiday read. Luckily, the books team have put their heads together to come up with the best novels and non-fiction titles to accompany you on the sun lounger. There are gripping thrillers, steamy romances, big fat histories and engrossing memoirs, both brand new hardbacks and some more lounge-friendly paperbacks. What are you planning to read this summer? Let us know in the comments below.
The 40 best novels
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in 12 years is a big, ambitious, scintillating ensemble piece about four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic who are connected by blood, friendship and employment. It’s a comedy of manners about female experience, from bad boyfriends to genital mutilation. But for all its moments of darkness, the novel has an irresistible vitality that hooks you from the first page. It reads like a feminist War and Peace.
4th Estate £20 pp416
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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Kaliane Bradley’s fish-out-of-water rom-com has a winning premise. A group of refugees from different eras are dragged into a laboratory in 21st-century London, where a new ministry is testing the limits of time travel. The narrator, a young British-Cambodian civil servant, is paired with Commander Gore, a cigar-smoking polar explorer from the Victorian era who must get to grips with everything from feminism to falafels. The book’s combination of whimsy and seriousness works brilliantly.
Sceptre £9.99 pp368
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The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor
In My Father’s House, Joseph O’Connor brought to life the world of Nazi-occupied Rome, as an Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, smuggled fugitives out to safety. In this follow-up, set a few months later, the tension doesn’t slack an inch. When a parachutist descends into the Colosseum, it sets off a chain reaction involving a widowed young aristocrat, a singer and the head of the Gestapo. It is haunting, sensuous and immaculately constructed — without sacrificing any thrills.
Harvill Secker £20 pp384
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All Fours by Miranda July
Miranda July practically invented a new genre of perimenopause fiction with this deliriously playful novel about midlife transformation. An artist in her mid-forties leaves her husband and child to embark on a three-week road trip to New York, but only makes it to a motel outside Los Angeles, where she lusts after a young Hertz rental car employee, whose wife she employs to redecorate her room. A strangely touching tale about a woman prepared to pay a high price for her sexual freedom.
Canongate £9.99 pp400
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Munichs by David Peace
A powerful account of the aftermath of the 1958 Munich air disaster that killed half of a brilliant young Manchester United team. The author of The Damned United, who can squeeze more poetry and tension out of a team sheet than any other living writer, reveals the details of what happened in the fabled crash. Faithful to the language of the place and time, David Peace gives a sense of the distinctive communities out of which Manchester United was formed.
Faber £9.99 pp480
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Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney made her name as the master of complicated, yearning romantic entanglements between people with terrible communication skills. There’s still plenty of that in her latest novel, Intermezzo, but the focus is on two brothers, Peter and Ivan, who have recently lost their father. Peter is a high-achieving lawyer while Ivan is a socially awkward chess whizz — they must navigate their tricky relationship with each other, while also handling some typically Rooneyan romances.
Faber £9.99 pp448
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The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr
In Killybegs in 1973, a man can do three things: be a fisherman, work in a fish factory or drive the fish to buyers. But when a baby boy is discovered in a barrel floating close to shore, the place acquires an air of magic. In Garrett Carr’s wise and witty debut we follow that boy, Brendan, and his adoptive family. But the book is expansive, too, with a chorus for a narrator and delightfully well-rounded minor characters. It’s an ode to Donegal and its no-nonsense people.
Picador £16.99 pp336
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Gunk by Saba Sams
With a greasy fried egg flopped on to the cover, Gunk is the It novel to be seen with on the beach this summer. But it’s more than its aesthetic. Written by the 29-year-old Brit (and mother of three) Saba Sams, it’s a tale of unconventional parenthood and the fuzzy lines between friend and lover. Set around a grotty Brighton nightclub (the eponymous “Gunk”), it follows thirtysomething Jules as she navigates working with her loser ex-husband, Leon, and the new, enigmatic barmaid Nim.
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp240
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You Are Here by David Nicholls
David Nicholls’s most satisfying love story yet is full of longing and doubt, of crap English B&Bs and soggy hikes. It centres on two lonely people thrown together on Alfred Wainwright’s famous coast-to-coast walk. Michael, a geography teacher mourning the end of his marriage, and Marnie, a divorced copy editor, are given a second chance at love when a mutual friend invites them on a group holiday, only to abandon them. Nicholls hits the sweet spot between pathos and bathos.
Sceptre £9.99 pp368
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The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce
After the phenomenal success of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has been widely appreciated as an author of quiet, often older lives. In The Homemade God she changes tack, instead following the family holiday of Vic Kemp, a popular but ageing artist, and his children: Goose, Susan, Iris and Netta. As the sun beats down on their mansion on an Italian lake, the holiday threatens to spoil — particularly with the appearance of Vic’s young new wife, Bella-Mae.
Doubleday £20 pp384
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Dream State by Eric Puchner
If you’re looking for literary value, Dream State is basically three novels for the price of one. We start off in 2004 as Cece plans her wedding to Charlie, with the help of his best friend Garrett. But what begins as a high-stakes love triangle tale transforms into an engrossing family saga, spanning 50 years. The magnetic pull between the three characters is enough to sustain a third plotline: the devastating effect of climate change on Montana and the life they have built there.
Sceptre £18.99 pp448
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Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
Shy Creatures contains many of the same winning ingredients as Clare Chambers’s whirlwind 2020 bestseller, Small Pleasures: a hardworking heroine in her thirties, an extramarital affair, a freakish real-life mystery and an undercurrent of sex and danger. Set in 1960s Croydon, it tells the story of an art therapist working in a psychiatric hospital who is trying to help a young man whose spinster aunts have kept him locked away for several decades.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.99 pp400
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I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan
How do you write a ghost story for Gen Z? Make it about the horrors of London’s housing market, of course. In Róisín Lanigan’s smart, pacey debut, a young couple, Áine and Elliot, are shocked when they find a one-bed flat to rent at a reasonable price. But then mould begins to bloom across the walls, the heating is terrible and Áine becomes afraid of glaring neighbours whom Elliot can never seem to see. This is a sharp and witty read, best enjoyed far from damp and oversized rats.
Fig Tree £16.99 pp288
Buy a copy of I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There
The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston
This is a fantastically original revenge drama about Cumbrian sheep farmers. Set during the foot-and-mouth disease crisis in 2001, this dark, visceral debut is a blood-soaked “English western” narrated by Steve Elliman, a brooding truck driver who is drawn back to his father’s farm. The novel begins bloodily: Steve and his neighbouring farmer, William Herne, are forced to slaughter and burn all livestock within three miles of the outbreak. A thrilling, cinematic book full of black humour.
John Murray £10.99 pp272
Buy a copy of The Borrowed Hills
Paperboy by Callum McSorley
Looking for something a little bit … filthy? Try Paperboy, the Scottish crime writer Callum McSorley’s follow-up to Squeaky Clean, where the (slightly incompetent) detective Ali McCoist has to solve the murder of a lawyer. Meanwhile, she’s bumping up against some of Glasgow’s worst gangsters — and trying to make it out alive. This energetic novel from a rising star of crime is full of black comedy, gore, slapstick and street slang.
Pushkin Vertigo £16.99 pp384
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The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
The video game designer Holly Gramazio has produced a satire on the Tinder generation’s commitment issues that takes a clever concept and turns it into one of the most inventive debut novels in years. Thirtysomething Lauren returns home drunk from a hen do to discover that her flat has a magical attic that generates a revolving door of husbands. When she tires of one spouse, she can summon another, just as long as she can coax the rejected man into the attic.
Vintage £9.99 pp368
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Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway
There was a lot of scepticism in the air when Nick Harkaway, the son of John le Carré, announced that he was resurrecting George Smiley, but he has pulled it off with brio and an air of effortlessness. Karla’s Choice is set in the ten-year gap between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A Russian agent arrives to kill a Hungarian publisher in Primrose Hill but realises he can’t do it. All roads, Smiley discovers, lead to his KGB nemesis, Karla.
Penguin £9.99 pp320
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Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
Jessica Stanley’s novel combines romance with brutal realism as it follows Coralie, an Aussie expat in London, as she falls in love with Adam. It’s all going well until Adam gets his dream job as political sketch writer at The Times and their life is taken over by Brexit, squabbles and appearances on The Andrew Marr Show. Coralie, meanwhile, feels “like a widow without the sympathy”. A wickedly funny tale about ambition, parenthood and long-term relationships.
Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99 pp352
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Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Vincenzo Latronico’s ingenious satire on Insta-friendly millennial living has become one of the buzziest books of 2025 — and it’s only 120 pages. Anna and Tom are members of the 21st-century creative class living in a fashionable Berlin neighbourhood in the early 2010s. We learn about them through the images they present and the items they own — a Japanese teapot, a Berber rug and houseplants. So many houseplants. It’s a horribly compelling tale of commodity fetishism.
Fitzcarraldo £12.99 pp120
Buy a copy of Perfection
Dirty Money by Charlotte Philby
The first book in a crime series by the granddaughter of Kim Philby, who is celebrated for her espionage novels. Dirty Money features a winning duo in DS Madeleine Farrow, a successful operative in a government agency, and Ramona Chang, a former investigative journalist trying to make it as a private detective. In this story, which spans dingy east London and upmarket Marylebone, Farrow is investigating the wife of an oligarch from Kazakhstan and Chang is getting to the bottom of a dodgy dating site.
Baskerville £16.99 pp320
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James by Percival Everett
A radical and funny reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain that was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It’s told from the perspective of the seemingly placid slave, Jim, who we discover is only pretending to be superstitious and illiterate so his white masters aren’t threatened by him. Percival Everett subverts and enlarges Twain’s classic to produce a thrilling, canon-shattering work.
Picador £9.99 pp320
Buy a copy of James
The Names by Florence Knapp
If you don’t mind crying on the beach then pack a copy of The Names. In this (deservedly) hyped debut Cora must take her baby boy to be registered. Her abusive husband wants him to be named Gordon, after himself. Their daughter, Maia, likes Bear as a name, while Cora is drawn to Julian. Florence Knapp’s novel then splits into three, following the family through the twists of fate set in motion by each name. Prepare to be irritated by anyone who interrupts your reading.
Phoenix £16.99 pp352
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The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
It’s 1891 in the mining town of Butte, Montana. A young Irish immigrant called Tom Rourke works as a photographer by day and prowls the town’s bars and brothels by night. But when he has to photograph Polly Gillespie, the mail-order bride of the mine captain, it’s love at first sight. The pair soon decide to get the hell out of Dodge. The Heart in Winter is a hot-blooded, chaotic wonder of a novel, written in Kevin Barry’s typically inventive prose.
Canongate £9.99 pp224
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Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
“Bridget Jones goes to Iraq” is probably the simplest way to explain this hilarious debut novel. Thirtysomething Nadia is heading up a UN programme to deradicalise Isis brides in Iraq. That sounds pretty harrowing, but this is an utterly riotous satire as our hapless protagonist runs into a sweary east London Isis bride (who jokes about the sexual proclivities of Osama bin Laden). When you’re not giggling you’ll find yourself thinking differently about this most divisive of issues.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99 pp336
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• ‘I could have been an Isis bride’: Nussaibah Younis on making fun of extremism
Long Island by Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín’s enthralling sequel to his acclaimed novel Brooklyn reunites us with Eilis 20 years later, in the 1970s. The girl from Co Wexford is now a middle-aged woman living in Long Island, New York, with her children and husband, whom she learns has made another woman pregnant. The revelation causes Eilis to head back to Ireland, where she goes in search of Jim, a shy publican whom she once loved. Tóibín dramatises secrecy and its consequences better than almost any other contemporary novelist.
Picador £9.99 pp368
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• Colm Tóibín: a writer’s last work has a special intensity
Red Water by Jurica Pavicic
This is a novel about Yugoslavia’s civil war but seen through a specific lens. In 1989 a teenage girl, Silva, disappears from a village on the Dalmatian coast. But the fall of communism and the rise of unrest means that the investigation to find her slows to a halt. It is fascinating how Jurica Pavicic, who is from Split, tracks the impact of the missing girl and of the political situation on ordinary people in the village — her parents, a friend, the detective.
Bitter Lemon £9.99 pp402
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The Pretender by Jo Harkin
If you’re searching for proper escapism, why not head to the 1480s? John Collan, a peasant boy, has his life upended when an aristocrat sweeps him away to Oxford, claiming that John is really the Earl of Warwick, with a claim to the throne. Based on the real life of Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne, Jo Harkin’s novel is touching and hilarious. She has immense sympathy for John as he tries to figure out who he really is.
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp464
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Precipice by Robert Harris
Robert Harris’s 16th novel is a riveting tale of politics, war and erotic obsession centred on the prime minister HH Asquith and his vivacious aristocratic mistress Venetia Stanley. At the time of their all-consuming intimacy in 1914, he was 61 and she was 26 and, extraordinarily, Stanley became Asquith’s “most darling counsellor” as his Liberal government faced devastating battle losses and ammunition shortages.
Penguin £9.99 pp544
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The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Yael van der Wouden’s steamy, twisty debut about forbidden love and the heavy burden of history has just won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It follows Isabel, a young woman living alone in her deceased mother’s home in 1960s Holland. Her quiet, controlled life is interrupted by Eva, her brother’s girlfriend, who comes to stay for a month and disrupts everything Isabel thinks about herself, her family and the country she lives in. There’s an incredible twist about halfway through.
Penguin £9.99 pp272
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Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt
Management consulting and tidal energy start-ups … I know, I know, it doesn’t scream “beach read”. But Alexander Starritt’s third novel will have you hooked. It’s a tale of two promising young men, James Drayton and Roland McKenzie, who graduate from Oxford in the early 2000s and enjoy the promises and pitfalls of 21st-century capitalism, from the recession to Covid, from Brexit to Trump. More than that it’s an ode to the enduring power of male friendship.
Swift £16.99 pp512
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Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Butter is a feminist crime novel with a delicious premise. Manako Kajii is sitting in prison, convicted of murdering men whom she had dated and swindled out of millions of yen before poisoning them with beef stew. To get close to Manako, the reporter Rika Machida agrees to start cooking all her favourite recipes. This is a full-fat, Michelin-starred treat that moves seamlessly between an angry young woman narrative and an engrossing detective drama and back again.
4th Estate £9.99 pp464
Buy a copy of Butter
Flesh by David Szalay
David Szalay, the author of Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is, has adopted a leaner, sparer style of writing for his latest beguiling novel, which tracks one man’s life over 50 years. He follows an inscrutable Hungarian called Istvan from awkward adolescence, when he had an affair with an older neighbour, into middle-age as an intensely wealthy man in London. It’s tense, unnerving and charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.
Jonathan Cape £18.99 pp368
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Love Forms by Claire Adam
A quietly powerful story of a woman searching for the daughter she gave up for adoption. Dawn, a recently divorced Londoner who grew up in Trinidad, has spent years trying to track down the daughter she secretly gave birth to as a teenager. She became pregnant in 1980 and was smuggled to a convent in Venezuela, where she handed the baby over to nuns. A tender story about a woman trying to make sense of her life, it reads like a Claire Keegan story expanded by Elizabeth Strout.
Faber £16.99 pp304
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Fast by the Horns by Moses McKenzie
Moses McKenzie’s vivid, witty, exuberant novel goes back to 1980, to a defining moment in Bristol’s history, when many of the residents of St Pauls were clashing with the police over the treatment of the Afro-Caribbean community. It’s narrated in a propulsive patois by 14-year-old Jabari, whose father, a Rastafarian community leader, has been thrown in a police cell. It’s an electric novel about black boyhood.
Wildfire £10.99 pp256
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• The Sunday Times Young Writer award: meet our shortlisted authors
The Vipers by Katy Hays
If you’re heading to Capri, why not pack this superlative crime novel, which contrasts the area’s rugged landscapes and high-end visitors? It centres on the wealthy Lingate family, who have been holidaying there for ever, even though Richard Lingate’s wife died there 30 years ago, falling from a cliff. When his wife’s necklace reappears (with a blackmail note demanding millions), long-buried secrets threaten to float to the surface.
Bantam £16.99 pp336
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Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Gail’s daughter is about to get married despite significant qualms, and her annoying ex-husband has forgotten to book a hotel (and brought along a cat). All that would be manageable if she hadn’t just quit her job (or been sacked, depending on who you ask). Anne Tyler’s latest novel is a joy to read as she once again transforms the problems of ordinary people living ordinary lives into something funny, touching and real. It’s also short — you could get through it on a long-haul flight.
Chatto & Windus £14.99 pp176
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The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
This darkly funny book about power, manipulation and complicity in the 1930s feels very relevant to the present-day political climate. It’s about the small compromises that led the Austrian film director GW Pabst to accept fascism. Having fled the shadow of the German Reich to Hollywood, he was forced to return to Germany to create propaganda films for the Nazis. Daniel Kehlmann is strong on how quickly fear and corruption become normalised.
riverrun £22 pp352
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Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell
This powerful portrayal of coercive control follows Ciara, who decides to leave her husband, Ryan, one afternoon after years of emotional and sexual abuse. At the time she flees her daughters are two and four and she has just discovered she’s pregnant again. But she doesn’t get very far after Ryan manages to block her children’s passports. With skill and economy Roisín O’Donnell puts you inside the dilemmas of a woman who is constantly doubting herself.
Scribner £16.99 pp400
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Fair Play by Louise Hegarty
The set-up of Louise Hegarty’s debut seems simple: Abigail is hosting an annual murder mystery party held on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the birthday of her brother, Benjamin. As morning dawns Benjamin, of course, is dead. Cue the arrival of Auguste Bell, a private detective plucked straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. We flick between a meta murder-mystery comedy and the very real grief of Abigail. A great read for any murder mystery fans.
Picador £16.99 pp288
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Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford
It’s the summer of 1989 in rural “horses-and-beeswax” New England and after convening at the house of their childless Aunt Frankie, nine children must find their cousin, three-year-old Abi, who has chased a wild creature. This short, ambitious, surreal debut novel is written in the first person plural, representing the gulf between a motley group of young cousins and their bickering parents, who harbour secrets and resentments.
Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99 pp192
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The 40 best non-fiction books
Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer’s memoir of growing up in 1960s and 1970s Cheltenham as part of an ordinary working-class family is wonderfully evocative, ranging from his love of Eagle and Beezer comics to The Generation Game playing on television and the “slop” of school dinners. Dyer writes especially movingly about his parents, and how his life became “incommunicable” to them after he passed the 11-plus and later left home. “If you’ve read Dyer before then you’ll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven’t, it’s the perfect place to start,” John Self said in his review.
Canongate £20 pp288
Buy a copy of Homework
Sword: D-Day — Trial by Battle by Max Hastings
Max Hastings first wrote about the world-changing events of June 6, 1944, in his book Overlord, in 1984. This new one approaches the Allied invasion of Normandy from the bottom up; it’s less interested in generals and geopolitics and instead focuses on individual soldiers, in particular the British men who landed on Sword Beach. He carefully sketches their characters, often by describing the things they carried. Lieutenant Alan Jefferson, for instance, took a tuning fork and a copy of Hamlet. Signaller Finlay Campbell carried a fountain pen given to him for his 21st birthday. A thoroughly moving history.
William Collins £25 pp400
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Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion by Lamorna Ash
When 29-year-old Lamorna Ash heard that two of her university pals had given up their careers in stand-up comedy to become Anglican priests, it prompted her to undertake a nationwide search for other young people who were turning (or returning) to religion. Ash throws herself fully into this investigation of faith, saying yes to everything from a Bible course to a silent retreat. “It is not only a fascinating sociological study and religious memoir, but a profound look at the power of ritual and communion with others,” Laura Hackett said in her review.
Bloomsbury Circus £22 pp352
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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson
Muriel Spark knew as a schoolgirl that she was “destined” to write, that she had to take up her pen “or else burst”. In a new biography of the great 20th-century author, known best for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Frances Wilson reveals that Spark had a life almost as strange and offbeat as her novels. At 19 she moved from Edinburgh and got married in southern Rhodesia, but within two years had run off to London to be general secretary of the Poetry Society, abandoning her young son. There she had a breakdown — partly brought about by diet pills — and became convinced that TS Eliot was stalking her. A woman with a brilliant, uncanny mind.
Bloomsbury Circus £25 pp432
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Knife by Salman Rushdie
“So it’s you. Here you are.” That’s what crossed Salman Rushdie’s mind as a man in black climbed on to the stage at a literary event in New York state in 2022 and stabbed him many times. His “almost murder” lasted 27 seconds, but Rushdie had been anticipating it for decades, ever since the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death in 1989. This affecting memoir chronicles exactly what happened that day, as well as Rushdie’s long, arduous recovery.
Vintage £10.99 pp224
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• Salman Rushdie: I am ‘over my attack’ and have found closure
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie
This history investigates pop’s greatest bromance: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It begins in 1957, when 16-year-old Lennon invited McCartney, a year and a half his junior, to get involved with his skiffle group. The journey from there to global domination is familiar, but there’s a freshness to this most recent telling, and Ian Leslie is particularly knowledgeable when it comes to the key songs and records. “This is a wonderful contribution to the ever-growing Beatles library,” our reviewer said.
Faber £25 pp432
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The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson
This is both a memoir of a divorce and a sweeping cultural commentary. Starting with the enormous heart-shaped tin she used to bake her wedding cake — now a painful reminder of her separation from her husband after 23 years of marriage — Bee Wilson proves that it’s not unusual for the things we keep in our kitchens to develop outsized sentimental value. Melon ballers, milk jugs and vegetable corers all have something to tell us. A fascinating and heartwarming read.
4th Estate £18.99 pp320
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Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
Hares are too often dismissed as big ugly rabbits, but with her gentle yet remarkably detached memoir, telling how she found an abandoned leveret during lockdown and raised the little beast inside her home, Chloe Dalton sets the record straight in her unexpected bestseller. The supposedly untameable creature gets so comfortable in human company that Dalton even installs a hare-flap in her back door. It reads like a love letter to the natural world.
Canongate £10.99 pp304
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• Chloe Dalton: My father read Joseph Conrad to us at the kitchen table
The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood by Sarah Hoover
Few motherhood memoirs start with coke dealers and edibles, but Sarah Hoover’s curious contribution to the canon is different. It opens with a candid admission that “the last line of my baby shower invitation said no gifts unless it’s drugs”, and proceeds to repeatedly flip the bird at a society that expects women to be natural mothers and believe their children are the most precious things that exist. When Hoover’s son arrived in October 2017, she admits with refreshing candour, she just thought he was ugly. A frank, often funny account of a reluctant mother.
Simon & Schuster £20 pp352
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William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare
In this eccentric mash-up of biography, history and memoir, Philip Hoare reveals how the Romantic visionary William Blake made the world a more strange and beautiful place. If you’re after a straight-up account of the poet-artist’s life, this isn’t for you. But if you want an account that pinballs from his influence on Oscar Wilde to David Bowie’s pop videos, then on to the author getting drunk with Peter Ackroyd, then onwards to an account of looking at the world through Blake’s spectacles, then this is the book for you. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in his review described it “as one of the most original and uncategorisable works I’ve read for a long time … Get ready to see it on some important prize shortlists this year.”
4th Estate £22 pp464
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The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock
Between 1964 and 1973, the psychiatrist William Sargant was in charge of the in-patient psychiatric unit in St Thomas’s Hospital, London. The unit came to be known as “The Sleep Room”, because Sargant drugged his female patients so they would be unconscious for up to 20 hours a day, waking them up only to administer electroconvulsive therapy. In this shocking yet thorough investigation, Jon Stock speaks to some of the women who were admitted to the ward, uncovering the truth about this abuse of power.
Bridge Street £25 pp432
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The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker
By all accounts, Eric Tucker’s life didn’t amount to much. Born in Warrington, Lancashire, he left school at 14 and spent his life drifting between jobs, including labouring, sign painting and, for a little while, grave digging. It was only after he died that his nephew Joe discovered a treasure trove of impressive paintings that Tucker had completed across many years. In this loving memoir, Joe paints a portrait of his uncle, who would later be labelled as “the secret Lowry”.
Canongate £18.99 pp224
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Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker
Except for their literary prowess, what do Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann have in common? Each moved to rural England after personal tragedy. In this charming, vivid portrait of the three 20th-century figures, which won this year’s Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Harriet Baker explains how the countryside was more than just an escape, but a means of carrying out “new experiments in form, and feeling”.
Penguin £10.99 pp384
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The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents reported loneliness in 2018 compared with 2012. In England, NHS records show that more than 10,000 girls under 18 were treated in hospital for self-harm in 2010 and that by 2016 it was nearly 15,000. In The Anxious Generation, the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the almost unanswerable case that the root of such tragic trends is the spread (and constant use) of smartphones. Rather than hanging out with friends, the youth of today are isolated in their bedrooms, scrolling through social media content that frequently includes toxic information. This is a dispiriting but essential read about a large and looming social problem.
Penguin £10.99 pp464
Buy a copy of The Anxious Generation
• Jonathan Haidt: How we can save our children from smartphones
Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne
In her jaw-dropping memoir, the self-confessed sociopath Patric Gagne explains what it’s like to experience emotions differently to the average person, piecing together the events from her early life that first made her think that she might be immune to the pangs of guilt, remorse and affection that guide most ordinary people’s actions. Cat-strangling, carjacking, lock picking and a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion feature in this eye-opening cocktail of pop psychology and shocking personal anecdote.
Bluebird £10.99 pp368
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Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
The author best known for The Buddha of Suburbia had his life changed by an unlikely accident in 2022, when he passed out, slumped off his sofa and snapped his spinal cord. It left him paralysed, unable to walk or even to wash himself. In just a few weeks, however, his writing impulse returned. This memoir combines the notes he took in hospital, dictated to family members, and post-accident reflections on becoming a “near vegetable”. It makes for uncomfortable reading, but is full of wisdom about freedom and self-renewal.
Penguin, £10.99 pp336
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• Hanif Kureishi: The accident left me ‘like a turtle on its back’
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams
In 2011 Sarah Wynn-Williams joined Facebook as an optimistic young New Zealander. She left seven years later, disillusioned by what she sees as the tech company’s moral corruption. In Careless People she turns whistleblower, alleging that Facebook has crept up to dictatorships and manipulated algorithms to prey on the insecurities of its users in its ruthless pursuit of money and power. “It started as a hopeful comedy and ended up in darkness and regret,” she writes. The book, our reviewer said, is at once “compelling and depressing”.
Macmillan £22 pp400
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The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life by Drew Harvell
The world’s oceans contain 97 per cent of all water on the planet, yet we landlubberly humans glimpse only the top of them. Except, that is, for the marine biologist Drew Harvell, who has spent a lifetime donning scuba gear and risking the unseen dangers beneath the surface to get up close and personal with the creatures that live there. In this enchanting book she uses the complex histories of eight underwater creatures to showcase the mind-boggling variety of marine life, from nine-brained octopuses to phosphorescent sea gooseberries and gunge-busting sponges.
Bodley Head £20 pp288
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A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry
New York jazz, London punk, hip-hop: Neneh Cherry has moved through enough music scenes to have material for a dozen books. But in this, her first memoir, the 61-year-old Swedish singer offers a brilliant insight into the joys — and the perils — of a creative life. The influences of her mother, the bohemian artist Moki, and her stepfather, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, are key — and explain why, as a child, she was given a Toblerone by Miles Davis — but she proves with gusto that she has her own tales to tell.
Vintage £10.99 pp336
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Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
This quirky biography tells the story of Louis Wain, the troubled artist who carved out a career as a cat cartoonist for the illustrated press before ending up in a lunatic asylum where he drew bright, kaleidoscopic kittens decades before they became popular (Sixties pop artists loved them). Alongside this, Kathryn Hughes gives us a social history of the cat, how it went from unloved mouse catcher to the most pampered of pets. One thing we learnt: there is a long tradition of giving felines lamentable names — Thomas Hardy, who really ought to have known better, had one called Kiddlewinkpoops-Trot.
4th Estate £10.99 pp416
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Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War by Jonathan Dimbleby
Many books about the world wars are depressingly inelegant, but Jonathan Dimbleby’s works are in a different league. This titanic account of the Eastern Front in 1944 covers an enormous canvas from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but it’s the human details that linger in the mind, from the panic of German soldiers driven back through the snow to the doomed heroism of Warsaw’s resistance fighters. Despite the harrowing subject matter, Dimbleby handles his material with such skill and wisdom that his book is a pleasure to read.
Penguin £10.99 pp640
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Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
The paperback of this Baillie Gifford-shortlisted book comes out on July 3. It’s timely. It’s a non-fiction, tick-tocking thriller that imagines how a nuclear war might start and then unfold. Well, at least the end will be quick: it could take as little as 26 minutes and 40 seconds before the Earth becomes uninhabitable once the rockets start flying. Annie Jacobsen’s account isn’t based on fancy; she has interviewed dozens of military experts to make her various scenarios as plausible as possible. Mark Urban described it as an “undeniably gripping narrative”, which perhaps explains why Denis Villeneuve, the new James Bond director, is adapting it for the screen.
Penguin £10.99 pp400
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The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton
Why did the French Revolution happen? One could examine bread prices or the manoeuverings in conventions and assemblies — or maybe it would be more fruitful to get a sense of the national mood. The distinguished historian Robert Darnton does just that — he casts his eye over poems, gossip, scandal sheets, the bonnets that women wore and the songs that were sung to get a sense of the “revolutionary temper”. He juxtaposes highfalutin philosophy with low rumour, showing how one blended into the other, to explain how revolution erupted in 1789. “This book is, quite simply, a feast, but one that, thanks to superb storytelling, is easy to digest,” Gerard DeGroot wrote.
Penguin £16.99 pp576
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Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner
For sheer entertainment, this rollicking account of Britain before the Great War is hard to beat, brimming as it is with swindlers, murderers and charlatans, imperialist fantasies and saucy innuendos. The scope is vast, covering everything from the suffragettes to The Wind in the Willows, and the social historian Alwyn Turner proves a wonderfully enthusiastic narrator.
Profile £11.99 pp400
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Arnhem: Black Tuesday by Al Murray
The comedian Al Murray is a serious history buff and the battle of Arnhem has been an obsession since childhood, “present in my imagination for as long as I can remember, a peculiar and powerful singularity”. He has read everything there is to read, walked the streets of the old town and stood on the bridge across the Rhine — that bridge too far. He does a terrific job of evoking the chaos of one day — Tuesday, September 19, 1944 — as the men of 1st Airborne tried to secure that bridge against fierce German opposition. It was bloody chaos. “Everything was happening everywhere, all at once.”
Penguin £10.99 pp432
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Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape by Nicola Moorby
Britain had waited centuries for a landscape artist of genius and suddenly in the early 19th century two came along at once — John Constable and JMW Turner. Little wonder that in art history they tend to be stereotyped as rivals and polar opposites. In this dual biography Nicola Moorby counsels against seeing them as such. Both men had a bigger problem — that most English of themes, the countryside, was not seen as a fitting subject for artists. To Constable’s despair, the aristocracy — the source of patronage — preferred “the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of landscape”.
Yale £25 pp352
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The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction by Henry Gee
Homo sapiens is on the edge of extinction — we’ll probably die off within the next ten millennia; a blink of an eye in the deep time of the Earth. Henry Gee, a palaeontologist, takes the long view. He looks at what might kill us off — famine, war, climate change, pandemics and so on — but the most fascinating parts of the book look at our distant past, when Homo sapiens was one of a number of different hominids before we drove our competitors into oblivion (bye bye Neanderthals, Denisovans and so on). In his description, 100,000 years ago we lived in a real Middle-earth alongside giants, troglodytes, hobbits and so on. Gee has a knack for making science come alive with a vivid image and witty phrase.
Picador £18.99 pp288
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Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King by Gareth Russell
James I had serious affairs with at least six men. “He loves indiscreetly and obstinately,” a contemporary observer remarked, “despite the disapprobation of his subjects.” These favourites he showered with favours, land, titles and slobbering kisses. In Queen James, the historian Gareth Russell foregrounds the intimate side of the king. It’s seriously researched history, though, rather than salacious speculation. The man that emerges is clever, educated, filthy-tongued with a talent for languages, unpleasant and a lover of dirty jokes and luxury. It’s good to know that he had a pet otter, which he would take for walks on a jewel-encrusted leash.
William Collins £25 pp496
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Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund
Two bright young journalists on this paper give us the inside story of how Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff and the most interesting character in this account, fought the battle to win Labour back from the Corbynistas. Starmer emerges as a ruthless, deeply pragmatic and strangely apolitical politician, a man “forever uninterested in the politics of politics itself”.
Bodley Head £25 pp480
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Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England by Joanne Paul
Thomas More, like Henry VIII’s other chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, has always divided historians. Was he a heresy-hunting Catholic zealot, a torturer and murderer of Protestants? Or a martyr of saintly, spotless conscience, the cultivated author of Utopia? Joanne Paul in this biography errs towards the more sympathetic camp. Our reviewer Alice Hunt wrote: “Paul is brilliant at bringing the swirl of Catholic England to life: its candlelit rituals, Latin prayers and saints’ days, punctuated by tinkling royal processions.”
Michael Joseph £30 pp644
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Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth
In December 2011 a young male wolf left his territory in Slovenia and began an arduous journey of several thousand miles across the Alps. He was wearing a GPS collar, so we know which rivers he swam, motorways he crossed and Alpine passes he loped along, on his travels across Austria and down into Italy. The nature writer Adam Weymouth follows in his pawprints, describing what he sees, as well as musing on our changing attitudes to the wolf.
Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99 pp384
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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins by Barbara Demick
Barbara Demick won the Baillie Gifford prize for her book Nothing to Envy, an extraordinary piece of reportage about ordinary lives in the totalitarian state of North Korea. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is a similarly impressive journalistic exercise, an investigation into how corrupt officials in China, especially the goons who enforced the brutal one-child policy, started stealing children and passing them off as orphans who could be adopted, for a fee (of course), by western couples. She focuses on the story of twins, separated as toddlers, and remarkably reunited 20 years later thanks to her sleuthing.
Granta £20 pp336
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The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-45 by Adam LeBor
The subtitle gives a clue to the large cast of characters involved in this lively, vivid history of Budapest during the Second World War. We meet glamorous actresses working for the anti-Nazi resistance, a Jewish teenage draughtsman who became a brilliant forger of passports, a Polish aristocrat who turned out, perhaps to her surprise, to be rather skilled at blowing things up … But, of course, this is a horrible story. The cosmopolitan city of Budapest descended into barbarism — and as the Red Army neared its walls, the fascist Arrow Cross government started to deport and murder the surviving Jews.
Head of Zeus £27.99 pp512
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The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue
If you’re bored with history books that entomb you in dates, extraneous details and footnotes, then The Golden Throne might be the answer. This account of the middle years of the reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent reads like a novel (the early years are recounted in The Lion House). The world of the 16th century — of eunuchs, diplomats, pirates and princes, of sea battles, stranglings and perfumed goings-on in harems — pops to life. Christopher de Bellaigue’s writing is confident and playful. If only more historians wrote with such verve.
Bodley Head £22 pp272
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The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far by Suzanne O’Sullivan
Suzanne O’Sullivan, an NHS neurologist, is a humane and thoughtful observer of the oddities of the human mind, especially psychosomatic conditions. Her 2015 book It’s All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness and the 2021 follow-up The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness are full of intriguing case studies and wise observations. The Age of Diagnosis ranges widely, taking in the drawbacks of mass screening for illnesses as well as the perils of overextending mental health categories so that what was once simply unusual behaviour earns itself a medical label of ADHD or autism. We make people sicker by the simple act of diagnosing them with a medical problem, she says. A fascinating book.
Hodder & Stoughton £22 pp320
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• ADHD, autism, cancer: this doctor says overdiagnosis is the issue
Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold
The eerie tale of how in the early 20th century, Dr Hawley Crippen fell in love with his typist, murdered his second wife, then fled across the Atlantic, triggering one of the most celebrated pursuits in modern history, is well known. But the historian Hallie Rubenhold thinks we have been telling it all wrong. Too often the wicked doctor is put at the heart of the story, while the women whose lives he touched are ignored or caricatured. She puts the victims centre stage. “Even though we know where the story is leading,” Dominic Sandbrook wrote in his review, “Rubenhold makes it tremendously exciting.”
Doubleday £25 pp512
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Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler by Tim Bouverie
The rising young historian Tim Bouverie made a name for himself with Appeasing Hitler (2019), a compelling study of the disastrous British diplomacy of the 1930s. This ambitious follow-up dissects the “improbable and incongruous Alliance” that defeated Hitler. Well-trodden ground, you might think, but it goes far beyond the British-Soviet-American troika, so we learn about Britain’s relationship with France (before and after its fall in 1940), nationalist China, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. It’s full of fascinating nuggets, character sketches and peppery judgments. Saul David called the book “a fine reassessment of Allied politics and diplomacy during the Second World War: impeccably researched, elegantly written and compellingly argued.”
Bodley Head £25 pp688
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The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David Rooney
In 1919 four teams of aviators battled to become the first to cross the Atlantic and win a £10,000 prize (about £660,000 in today’s money) posted by the Daily Mail. These men were driven by the purest form of heroic adventure — what one journalist called “sublime insanity”. The Big Hop is a glorious romp through an overlooked part of aviation history, stuffed full of intriguing characters and white-knuckle courage.
Chatto & Windus £22 pp320
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The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White
Edmund White died this year aged 85, but the grand old man of gay literature was writing up until the end. This “sex memoir” has all the unfiltered candour you’d expect of an octogenarian who was too old to care what anyone else thought. We learn everything — penis size, favoured positions — as well as meeting dozens of the thousands of men he fell in love with, ever so briefly and untenderly. It’s the rather touching last hurrah of a writer who never believed in something being “too much information”.
Bloomsbury £20 pp256
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The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera
Vasili Mitrokhin didn’t fit the Hollywood image of a secret agent. He was a scruffy oddball who had been demoted from fieldwork to the dreary backwater of the KGB’s archives. But the information he gleaned from burrowing in the shelves and boxes — and passed on to the West — was described as “the biggest counterintelligence bonanza of the postwar period”. Gordon Corera, formerly the BBC’s security correspondent and now a co-presenter of the intelligence podcast The Rest Is Classified, tells the story of this irascible, unlikely spy and his trove of secrets.
William Collins £25 pp336
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