BOOK OF THE WEEK
Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport by Darragh McGee
In 2024, there were 1.4 million British adults with a betting problem. Sports gambling accounts for a significant part of this, and it’s a growing trend, with Americans expected to bet more than $3bn on the World Cup that begins there this month.
In his new book, Imitation Games, Darragh McGee explores how gambling within football was less hijacked than welcomed with open arms. As Jessy Parker-Humphreys writes in her review, it was a result of “a perfect storm of deregulation by Tony Blair’s New Labour government, the arrival of the digital age, and the explosion of the Premier League”. Next season, and for the first time since 2002, no Premier League team will have a gambling sponsor on the front of their match shirts, as a result of a voluntary agreement in 2023 to reduce gambling advertising within the sport. As to the impact this may have on fans’ likelihood to gamble, is it way too little, far too late?
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Whistler by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett – the author of Commonwealth, Bel Canto and Tom Lake – never misses. And her latest novel, Whistler, continues that unbroken run, according to reviewer Erica Wagner.
It tells the story of a married couple, Daphne and Jonathan. Daphne, whose mother remarried a couple of times, becomes reacquainted with Eddie, who was her stepfather for only a year when she was younger. The story follows the “calm yet quietly transgressive love Daphne and Eddie share” – a love that at first unsettles Jonathan. As Erica writes, “transgression can take many forms. It’s not always to do with sex, but often with loyalty”.
Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam
If you’re looking for a properly funny yet thought-provoking new novel, try Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam, one of The Observer’s debut novelists of 2026. The book follows three young Muslim men on a night out on Manchester’s Curry Mile. Blackburn-based Salam’s prose is totally idiosyncratic: it bursts with slang and references both highfalutin and street; he dispenses with capitals other than for character names; and often skips into verse, at one point rewriting the whole of the Oasis song Wonderwall to tell the story of one character’s predicament.
Each of these men, though, is hiding a dark backstory – unable to tell his friends for fear of what they might think. On the surface, their night is full of hilarity and ridiculousness, but Salam’s novel is a striking comment on toxic masculinity and the harm it brings by preventing men from speaking openly about their emotions. It’s well worth your time.
END NOTES
This week, The Observer’s climate editor, Jeevan Vasagar, reviews two new books – The Fate of the World by Bill McGuire and The Response by David Shukman – that question if we can overcome political short-termism to fight the climate crisis. Here’s Jeevan:
“A disaster is a tear in the fabric of everyday life; a flood, a fire, an earthquake hits – seemingly out of nowhere – and the world is changed, for ever. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere, it just feels that way when the overwhelming force of wild nature is concentrated on a single spot. When I was writing my book about floods, The Surge, it quickly became clear that disasters are years in the making. Sometimes they are the result of bad decisions: houses, farms and roads sprawling too close to a flood-prone river. Or they might be the result of neglect – sea defences left to crumble. The flood itself may be sudden, but the devastation it causes is a story foretold.
“There are a couple of challenges for the writer of a book about climate change. One is that the story is, inevitably, a gloomy one. And it’s also a problem for which we are to blame. But in the face of catastrophe, the element of human agency in a disaster can be a source of hope. If we can create the conditions that make disasters worse, we should be able to build a better world too.”
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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