A pregnant poet stands in the aisle of a hardware store choosing between garden stakes, buys five of them and a rubber mallet and a tool belt, and practises drawing a stake from her hip under the fluorescent lights while the cashier watches.

A farmer buys a cow, and his pregnant wife comes out of the house to rub its forehead and name it Lucky. The cow is a girl who has been sold eleven times that fortnight, and she waits until after the evening milking to run away, because she thinks they have earned that much.

A demon crime lord in a stolen uniform, hands still wet with somebody's blood, haggles an eleven-year-old down from thirty dollars to twenty-five for five boxes of charity cookies. He eats one, throws the other four boxes in a bin, and tells her thank you.

An eleven-year-old steals four eggs from the neighbour's chickens, cuts the mould off the bread, arranges the plate on the good tray with a linen napkin and cuts flowers for a jar. She carries it upstairs to her mother, who looks at it and says she is not hungry.

In 1976 a lonely twenty-year-old is handed her own rent money on a mountain lawn and told to tear it up. Fifty years later, in a New York apartment building, a teenage detective starts noticing that the jars in a dead woman's kitchen are shelved in the wrong order.

A doctor asks a room of nine-year-olds how many have lost someone to a shooting, and every hand goes up. Then he teaches them to pack a bullet wound and hands out kits for their backpacks. One girl comes back the next week because she has used hers.

At the funeral rehearsal he climbs into the pulpit for a microphone test, notices strangers stepping out of the shadows to hear what he plans to say, and decides on the spot to lie to them.

Two men crouch beside a running bath tap in a Tehran embassy compound, one Russian, one British, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the water. What passes between them will reshape a revolution.

A ship's concierge asks a stranger whether her engagement ring is real. He tells her the truth. Everything the novel wants to argue about is already in that exchange.

One young American woman watched the end of imperial China from inside the empress's sitting room, wrote it all down, and was left out of every account since. This book is what happens when her diaries are finally read.

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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?

Discover Echoes of the Unspoken, Diana Elizabeth Martinovich’s gripping debut psychological thriller exploring control, silence, toxic relationships, resilience, and the fight to reclaim one’s voice.

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?

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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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.

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