What to read this week, from Patrick Radden Keefe to James Baldwin

BOOK OF THE WEEK

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

In November 2019, teenager Zac Brettler found himself on a balcony of London’s Riverwalk apartments after a series of wrong turns, first posing as a Russian oligarch’s son at his public school, then falling in with London’s dark money criminals who had spotted a mark. Exactly what happened in the hours before he fell to his death that night remains a mystery, but investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s forensic account of the Brettler family’s story, including their agonisingly protracted battle for answers with the Met police, leaves little doubt as to the question of whether Zac was fleeing danger that night. As Laura Cumming writes in her review, “The book amounts to a body of evidence so strong and secure – most particularly the staggering disclosures at the very end, from a source who cannot be named – as to be incontrovertible.”
Read the review | Order the book

WHAT TO READ NEXT

Offenses by Constance Debré

The writer Constance Debré is largely known for her autofiction, including the 2018 novel Playboy, which follows a woman who leaves her husband in search of bachelorhood and pleasure. The latest from the former criminal defence lawyer concerns an old woman stabbed to death in her suburban Paris apartment – sliding between perspectives from narrator, to first person, to close third person, with varying results. “Is she, the product of generational privilege, allying herself with the banlieue-dwellers, or has the voice got a little bit out of her control?” Chris Power asks of the novel’s shifting eye. “Such uncertainty gives the book a messy quality at odds with the knife-like clarity of its prose.” 
Read the review | Order the book

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs

The story of James Baldwin’s life has largely been told through his commitment to activism and towering successes as a writer, but here Nicholas Boggs sets out to find “the truth about Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate relationships and how they shaped his life and art”. As Colin Grant writes in his review, “What emerges most strongly from this biography is a portrait of a battle-hardened witness to America’s violence and bigotry, a man whose loyalty to family and friends is unimpeachable, and a tender soul, whose fragility is always close to the surface.” Boggs, a Baldwin scholar, traces his life in love – from the platonic love of a teacher who nurtured his talent, to the amorous encounters with men on his travels – in turn allowing for a new way of seeing him.
Read the review | Order the book

ENDNOTES

This week, Anthony Cummins interviewed author Jay McInerney for his new novel, See You on the Other Side. Here he recalls their wide-ranging conversation, from American football to fictionalising his ex-girlfriends:

When he popped up on my screen from California, dodging the weather in New York, Jay McInerney had just been watching CNN, still blaring in the background. Fiddling with the remote, he told me his appetite for news isn’t what it once was: tuning out a little from politics last year freed up some headspace for him to follow the 2025/26 American football season – allowing him to engage in something “that wasn’t an insoluble divide” for a change.

His latest novel, See You on the Other Side, revisits his recurring husband-and-wife duo Russell and Corrine Calloway. Although he's been writing about them for a quarter of a century, McInerney only recently understood that he had modelled Corrine not on any of his ex-wives or girlfriends but his mother, who died in 1979. He talked just as frankly about having had brain surgery, and his 400-page memoir-in-progress (legally ticklish; those ex-wives and girlfriends again). He also mentioned stealing a peek at the diary of his daughter’s godfather, Julian Barnes.

Read the interview | Order See You on the Other Side

Illustration by Charlotte Durance