The New Year is the perfect time to reorganise your bookshelf and make room for all those new books on your reading list. Decluttering expert Marie Kondo offers her top tips on tidying your books, with this extract from her new book Spark Joy.
Helen Dunmore’s remarkable new novel Exposure will take you on an emotional journey of forbidden love and the deepest betrayal. In light of her new book, the author reflects on the process of reading in an essay that explores how we read not just with our eyes, but with our hearts.
The most famous author you’ve never heard of, Stefan Zweig’s influence has been an inspiration for many, from Ali Smith to Wes Anderson. His one and only novel, Impatience of the Heart, has been newly translated for 2016, and is a story that explores how one moment can change a life forever.
Praised for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”, Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, and delivered her Nobel lecture on Monday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. You can read the lecture in full here.
With a story as dramatic and tragic as the Gothic novels she wrote, Charlotte Brontë’s life was not only fascinating, it was inspiring. The main force driving her family, Charlotte encouraged her sisters as poets and novelists, stepped in to support the family after her brother’s death, travelled Europe, and using her own experiences, crafted trailblazing female characters. In this extract from Charlotte Brontë: A Life, you can catch a glimpse of the unique life that inspired her stories.
Read an extract from A Snow Garden and Other Stories, a collection of six Christmas stories from Rachel Joyce, the author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. A Faraway Smell of Lemon It is as if Binny has stepped through a curtain and discovered an alternative universe. It’s been here for ever, this shop, […]
As the Rugby World Cup draws to a close, Think Smarter rewinds to the 1995 final in South Africa, one of the most momentous moments of post-apartheid unity. In this extract from Republic or Death, music journalist Alex Marshall looks at the South African national anthem’s messy beginnings, and how it might influence the nation’s future.
In an extract from Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads, author and activist Benedict Rogers recalls his unceremonious exit from Burma in 2011.
Edited and introduced by novelist and journalist Philip Hensher, The Penguin Book of the British Short Story celebrates the diversity and energy of British writers. In this extract, Hensher introduces the collection.
Long have authors had their stories reimagined by the magic of lighting, actors and mise en scène. From To Kill a Mockingbird to the recently released Suffragette, film adaptations have always made for gripping films, and here, we look at the latest books to come to the big screen.
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