A rabbit that was dead at breakfast is nibbling a girl's hair by lunch. Astrid Scholte turns the cursed portrait inside out: here the painter pays, and a whole court lives on her years. A sharp idea and a vivid castle, followed by a journey that never quite matches them.

A girl with a broken heart loses her shoes, sneaks into a masked ball and has until sunrise to outlast her school, her rival and a prince. Amber Hamilton's second novel is a grim Cinderella about grief, numbness and choosing who to love.

Taryn tells her twin a fairy tale about a murderous bridegroom before she admits what she did. Holly Black's illustrated Elfhame collection is at its best when its liars and tyrants explain themselves, and at its weakest when it asks newcomers to keep up.

Two girls practise a relay handoff in a dusty Georgia yard minutes before men with guns arrive. Karin Slaughter's 2017 novel follows those sisters into middle age, when a school shooting reopens the night that split them. Harrowing, clever about the law and generous to its survivors, though its last act explains more than it dramatises.

A long kitchen table on a Colorado ranch, two people pretending not to notice each other's knees. Sadie Kincaid closes her Wages of Sin duet with a romance about a woman learning to want things for herself, and lets the conspiracy around it fall apart too easily.

At dawn on a Gujarat beach, a thin old man bends down and picks up a crust of salt, and an empire starts to lose its grip. Kurlansky's history treats that gesture as the end of a five-thousand-year story about who owns the most ordinary thing on the table.

A laid-off federal writer comes home to a Darke County village whose meat plant is about to close, just as its residents start bursting open and coming back as something stranger and happier. John Scalzi's comic horror novel is generous, profane and sharp about money, though it settles its villains too easily.

Sixty years after leaving her childhood home in York, an actress climbs its narrow stairs to the attic and finds two of her drawings still on the wall. The memoir that follows talks its way through a whole life, and rarely in a straight line.

Two floors under the New York Public Library, a guard unlocks an oak box and shows a broke usher a scroll of narrow paper strips sealed end to end with wax, every inch of it covered in a dead poet's handwriting. The usher goes home and starts writing.

Every morning before breakfast a schoolteacher in Nishinomiya sits with his eyes shut before a glass case holding a carved bodhisattva, praying for soldiers on both sides of a war he never discusses. His son, now Japan's most famous novelist, spends this slim book working out why.

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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?

M. John Harrison won the Booker Prize 2026 with The End of Everything. In September I told groups not to start with it. Here is how to make it work if your club wants the winner anyway.

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.

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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