BOOK OF THE WEEK
Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right by Laura K Field
Liberals may think of Trumpism as an anti-intellectual movement, but it has its own philosophical currents, flowing from universities, thinktanks and journals. Laura K Field’s book, which Kenan Malik describes as “an outstanding intellectual history of the present”, provides an anatomy of Maga republicanism: there are the apocalyptic “Claremonters”; the Orbán-admiring new conservatives; the postliberals; and those on the toxic fringes of the “hard right underbelly”. These often-clashing factions are shaping the future of American conservatism – and therefore the political direction of the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT
Making the Cut: An Unorthodox Love Story by Max Olesker
This memoir of converting to Orthodox Judaism by the comedian Max Olesker does contain jokes – but there’s no denying that the road Olesker travels down is a lonely and hard one. In his review, Xavier Greenwood, who also converted for love, finds his own experiences reflected and refracted. “My conversion required me to attend the synagogue for adult learning classes and major holidays,” Greenwood writes. “Olesker has to go every morning. I was gently encouraged to develop a tradition that marks Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, while Olesker has no other option. He must unplug from all modern life for 25 hours each week.” This memoir leaves Greenwood with some big questions: what it means to choose a faith; how far we’ll go for love.
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May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
Rebecca Perry was selected as one of The Observer’s eight debut novelists of 2026 for May We Feed the King, a dual narrative that flits from a museum curator in the present to a dissolute king many centuries in the past. Our reviewer Olivia Ovenden admires a book that is lyrical and rich in its descriptive powers, while interrogating how we record and rely on history. A clever, beguiling novel from a writer to watch.
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ENDNOTES
Vanessa Thorpe writes:
Talking to Marion Coutts about her spare, luminous novel What Did the Deep Sea Say? quickly confirmed my hunch that the sculptor and writer would be no pushover. Coutts may have smiled back broadly, but precision is her business and finding the right words is her new pleasure and compulsion. No, she calmly corrected me, she was not on a beach “holiday” when she made the notes and took the photographs that shaped the first part of her new story. And no, this book is not “a sequel” to her exceptional memoir The Iceberg, which chronicled the period after her husband received a terrible terminal diagnosis. So Coutts would likely also disagree if I now point readers to her wonderful passage about pebbles – picking them up, storing favourites and then discarding them – and then suggest it is a good metaphor for her rigorous literary aesthetic. “These objects are potentially beautiful or interesting because they make you think of something else,” she told me, before confessing that the real beach she had stayed on had been made of sand: “You see, all writing is a construct!”
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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