Discover all you need to know about Books. Features, Pros and Contras. Books available for Android and iOS devices. Get it Now !
Search results
From ‘Shuggie Bain’ to ‘The Mirror and the Light’, read these best novels of 2020 from Waterstones, Bookshop, Blackwells and more.
- Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (Chicago Tribune) A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month.
- Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (The Point) I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds.
- Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster (The New York Times Book Review) Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any Sehgal review and stop there.
- Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Vox) Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’s place alongside Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in the Romantic canon.
- Clare Mulley
- Philip Hensher
- Christopher Howse
- Jonathan Sumption
- Allan Mallinson
- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- Naomi Alderman
- Mark Mason
- Cressida Connolly
- Frances Wilson
In the past I have sometimes wondered how many books I would read if only someone had the kindness to lock me up. It turns out, this Covid year, not to be so many — but the quality has been high. Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant and devastating The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (Guardian Faber, £10.99) fuelled me with an outrage i...
A strange year for a reader; and the most compelling literary experience I had was reading every one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels between March and July. The greatest vogue this novelist had was during the war years and in the time of privation afterwards. Reading, without distraction, her penetrating, disillusioned voices in the silence of an i...
Apart from 10,000 Not Out (Unicorn, £25), David Butterfield’s satisfyingly fact-stuffed but quirky history of The Spectator, the year has left me in suspense. David Carpenter’s Henry III (Yale, £30), full of good judgment in good prose, takes the story up to the point when the pesky Simon de Montfort ends the king’s personal rule. How he got out of...
There will never be a definitive life of Hitler. The subject is too vast, the man too contradictory and the sources unmanageable. But Volker Ullrich’s biography comes as close as we can reasonably expect. The second and final volume, Downfall: 1939-45 (Bodley Head, £30), which appeared in translation this year, maintains the high standards of writi...
I haven’t read many new books this year, but thanks to the pandemic I’ve read many that I hadn’t for decades. Especially Bernard Fergusson’s Beyond the Chindwin, about the first Chindit campaign, published in 1945, and Freddie Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral, about SOE in Malaya (1949). Also Field Marshal Slim’s Defeat into Victory(1956), w...
This hasn’t been a vintage year for fiction — plenty of novels that are woke, few that might keep anyone awake — with Martin Amis’s autofiction Inside Story (Cape, £20) being the exception. In biography it has been a far more interesting story. Along with A.N. Wilson’s bold, quirky The Mystery of Charles Dickens(Atlantic, £17.99), the best things I...
Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind(Profile Books, £12.99) should be on everyone’s reading list in these times of what a friend of mine calls ‘disagreement-phobia’ on all sides in politics and life. Jacobs thoughtfully discusses the benefits of reading long-dead authors — even though Edith Wharton wa...
In The Gran Tour(Icon, £14.99), the 33-year-old Ben Aitken joins pensioners’ coach trips to see what he can learn. At first there’s confusion (one woman thinks he’s French: ‘You looked like someone who’d go on strike a lot’), but the final result is both moving and hilarious. In Pitlochry, Kitty gets cross with Monica because she won’t do sambuca s...
Something in the ether seems to be leading to a crop of books — all excellent — about birds and grief. I absolutely loved Charlie Gilmour’s debut, Featherhood(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99). It’s a memoir about a delinquent baby magpie which comes into his care, and the troubled relationship Gilmour had with his absent (now late) biological father,...
Aunts make good copy, and Ferdinand Mount has never written a bad sentence, so his account of investigating the murky past of his Aunt Munca (she named herself after the vandalising mouse in Beatrix Potter) is bound to be a winner. Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca (Bloomsbury, £20) is a horribly funny tragedy about bourgeois aspira...
Dec 4, 2020 · NPR's Book Concierge returns with 380+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffers Seth Kelley, Kayla Lattimore and ...
For the past couple of decades, David Sedaris has more or less created his own genre, with his confessional stories that reveal both the absurdity and the emotion of everyday life.
Sep 1, 2022 · The book Mare Plasticum – The Plastic Sea (Streit-Bianchi et al. 2020) is a contribution to the increasing body of literature on marine plastic pollution. The editors assembled a multidisciplinary team of authors comprising scientists, artists, and communicators.
Dec 15, 2020 · Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2020, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Graphic Literature; Poetry; Mystery & Crime; Literature in ...
Literary Titan has helped hundreds of authors around the world be seen by real readers. Quick delivery, simple service, so many benefits for only $59. No hidden fees.
