What to read this week, from graphic novels to books on Bowie

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Made In America: The Dark History that Led to Donald Trump by Edward Stourton

Donald Trump’s interventionist adventures in Venezuela and his imperial designs on Greenland have shocked the international community – but, as Erica Wagner writes in her review of Edward Stourton’s timely history, “overreach is baked into the American project”. Nor is Trump the first to think of the world in terms of real estate: Thomas Jefferson acquired 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15m in 1803, and – as the historian Henry Adams wrote – “made himself a monarch” of this new territory, bought “without its consent and against its will”.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

Graphic novel of the month: The Crystal Vase by Astrid Goldsmith

The Observer journalist Rachel Cooke, who died in November 2025, was a great advocate for the comics form. In 2007, she set up the graphic short story prize, initially with Jonathan Cape and then Faber & Faber, and in 2010 she began her graphic novel column, a regular slot that became the pre-eminent forum for comics criticism in the mainstream press. This month, Killian Fox, an award-winning journalist, critic and editor who will be familiar to readers of The Observer New Review, takes up the mantle, as the column embarks on a new era. Fittingly, Killian’s first book choice is by a writer who won The Observer prize in 2022: Astrid Goldsmith’s The Crystal Vase is a moving, witty, inventive family memoir populated by exiles and eccentrics, and spanning Nazi Germany, Rhodesia and present-day Britain. It’s a richly rewarding example of an endlessly surprising form.
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In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction by Ella Risbridger

“A romance novel is always a love story; but a love story is not always a romance novel,” Risbridger writes. These are books, she insists, that tell us “there is space for love in the world”, even when – as Caroline Crampton writes in her review – everything around us seems to indicate the opposite. Covering everything from Pride and Prejudice to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Fifty Shades of Grey to Friends, the scope of Risbridger’s study is ambitious – perhaps too ambitious, Caroline thinks – but there is much to enjoy in this passionate love letter to a genre whose popularity has not always been matched by its status.
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Three books on Bowie

Alexander Larman – author of a new book, Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie – picks a trio of titles that shed new light on the starman, 10 years after his death.
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ENDNOTES

Ellen Peirson-Hagger spoke to the gloriously idiosyncratic Australian novelist Gerald Murnane for this week’s books interview, on the meaning of “true fiction”, his obsessions with archives and the republication of his book Landscape With Landscape. Here’s Ellen:

“Some people have a belief that I’m a recluse and I’m hard to talk to,” said Gerald Murnane, down the line from Goroke, a remote village in western Victoria, Australia, at the start of our call. “It’s actually the reverse.” Indeed, I quickly discovered that while the 86-year-old author has many eccentricities – not least his high-minded, self-referential fiction, the fact that he’s never been on an aeroplane, doesn’t own a computer, and spends his time brewing beer and adding to his archives, including one that details an imaginary horse-racing world – he was certainly not reserved. We spoke for over 90 minutes, until he decided he was “starting to babble”, and brought the interview to a close in his own particular way: “I’ve just taken a piece of paper out of the drawer,” he said, asking me to spell my name. “I’m not a bibliographer. I just want to record for the archives that you did this interview with me today.”
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance