Books

Cashing in on Harper Lee

The Land of Sweet Forever is a cynical, barrel-scraping trawl through the To Kill a Mockingbird author’s slight early works

Tangled up in Bob Dylan

In a quest to discover if Bob Dylan is his father, Sam Sussman’s Boy from the North Country reimagines his late mother’s affair with the musician

Who should pay the debts of slavery?

The Tory historian Nigel Biggar mounts a contradictory defence of empire, while in The Big Payback Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder make the case for reparations

What to read to understand the body

Three books to illuminate the science, beauty and strangeness of the human anatomy

Giuliano da Empoli: ‘I’m the scribe of a dying civilisation’

The Wizard of the Kremlin author on tech conquistadors, threats to democracy, and his friendship with Emmanuel Macron

The hotel that tells the story of Kabul

Lyse Doucet's finely observed portrait of the Inter-Continental hotel opens a window on to years of upheaval in Afghanistan, from civil war to the return of the Taliban

Boris Becker and Björn Borg: Serving time

For the two tennis champions, retirement brought battles with drugs, adultery and prison. But only one man makes a triumphant story of his struggle

Bora Chung’s ghosts of the present

The South Korean author's The Midnight Timetable is a supernatural story collection fit for the modern age

Halloween books for kids to sink their teeth into

Vampires called Buffy and Bella, a haunted house, and a game of hide-and-seek feature among a spooky seasonal feast

Evan Dando’s chaotic, narcotic life

The Lemonheads frontman’s riveting memoir Rumours of My Demise reveals the reality of addiction and fame

Claire-Louise Bennett: ‘Mystery is an essential part of loving someone’

The Big Kiss, Bye-Bye novelist on the challenges of capturing romantic relationships and the appeal of the gothic

László Krasznahorkai’s European nightmares

The Hungarian novelist’s political dystopias bear the unmistakable imprint of his country’s communist past

How the World Cup shaped football’s gilded age

Books by Jonathan Wilson and Simon Kuper trace the tournament’s history through corruption, controversies and the fierce competition to host the lucrative game

What to read to understand espionage

Three essential books on spies and their secret world

The making of Tennyson’s radical mind

Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep shakes off the poet’s fusty image to reveal a young man grappling with the doubts of his age

How the west was stolen

The exploits of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill became wild west myth, as Peter Cozzens’s history of Deadwood shows. But behind them lay the venal, illegal settlement of Native American land

Patricia Lockwood’s diary of a madwoman

Will There Ever Be Another You, the novelist’s absurdist dispatch from Covid land, is a wild and singular pleasure

What to read to understand Wall Street

Three books that explain the ambitions and fears that power America’s financial world