A timid guest in black sits in a pink-and-gold drawing room, holding a cake she will never bite, while an old man in a wheelchair offers to show her the table where his family died. Jackson's last novel turns a poisoning into the blackest of comedies.

A woman wakes to find a lost bumblebee crawling across her pillow, carries it naked through a garden cut into the rock of a tiny moon, and lets it choose a strawberry flower. The rest of the novel explains how she earned a morning that quiet.

Over dessert in an immortal's private lounge, the wine turns to blood and moths fill the light fittings. By the time the hallucinations fade, the immortal is dead. Jung's first novel is a hungry, haunted portrait of ambition and abuse that rewards its readers and occasionally exhausts them.

A dead painter is propped in a dining-room chair for one last family photograph, and her daughter will not look at her face. Kat Dunn's gothic is strongest when it watches grief through the eyes of the girl across the road, and weakest when its plot starts listening at doors.

A hotel clerk books two quarrelling agents in as Mr. and Mrs., and the last free room has a coin-operated vibrating bed. In a town that gasps at swearing and curses in baked goods, Cosimano and Morrissey stage a murder inquiry as a holiday movie gone badly, gloriously wrong.

A hotel clerk books two quarrelling agents in as Mr. and Mrs., and the last free room has a coin-operated vibrating bed. In a town that gasps at swearing and curses in baked goods, Cosimano and Morrissey stage a murder inquiry as a holiday movie gone badly, gloriously wrong.

His final book asks what Americans are, and answers that they are a people assembled out of mutual hostility who then invented a dream about home. A group will argue about one chapter all evening, and should.

A famous novelist spends 1943 filing war dispatches, then publishes them fifteen years later with a preface itemising the rules he worked under and the stories he agreed to suppress. The book and its own retraction, bound together.

Two Americans spent forty days in Stalin's Soviet Union in 1947 having promised each other they would explain nothing. Whether that promise was honesty or cowardice is the argument, and it was being had in 1948 too.

For fifty years this was read as a report from the road. It is now officially something else, and a group that reads it today gets a rarer thing than a travelogue: an argument about what a reader is owed.

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Six books, seven weeks until the winner, and one of them runs to six hundred pages. Which of the shortlisted novels to open first, which to save for a group, and which one I think wins.

Thirteen novels, one shortlist in September, and not enough evenings. Here is what each book on the Booker 2026 longlist actually is, and which one I would open first.

You have a ticket and not much time. Here is what I would actually read before Nolan's Odyssey, sorted by how many free evenings you have between now and the cinema.

Finishing Circe leaves a very specific hole. Here are the Greek myth retellings that actually fill it, and the ones that only pretend to.

Your group has decided to read Homer. Now comes the argument nobody expects: which Odyssey translation are you all reading, and what happens when half the room turns up with a different book?

The 2026 Nobel laureate writes verse novels, tango essays and boxed elegies. Here is which of Anne Carson's books work best in a group, what to ask about each, and how to run the meeting.

Three men in a kitchen disagree about a Hebrew verb, and six hundred pages depend on who is right. Here is how to run that argument at a meeting, including the part where Steinbeck's reading turns out to be contested.

Steinbeck told us Cathy Ames was born without a conscience and then wrote four hundred pages that contradict him. Zoe Kazan's adaptation takes the other side. Whether that is a repair or a rewrite is the argument worth having.

There is only one pearl buyer in town. He keeps several agents in separate offices so that it looks like a market. Once you notice that detail, the novella stops being a fable about greed and becomes something much angrier.

A defrocked preacher decides there is no such thing as an individual soul, and the whole novel is the Joad family slowly being forced to agree with him. Reading the book as that argument changes what the notorious last page is doing.

Christopher Null is an award-winning journalist, editor, and novelist.Null...

When an author services company fails, the loss is rarely just money. Here is what actually happens to your listings, your files, your identifiers and your unpaid royalties, stage by stage.

Most book club plot discussions end in summary or argument about plot holes. Here's a better set of questions — ones that get to what plot actually reveals about character, theme, and authorial intent — without the conversation feeling like a lecture.

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