A four-year-old in Frozen wellies feeds scraps to a farmer's pigs and spots something odd among the peelings. John Marrs's first short story follows the doting grandmother beside her, whose side job is making bodies disappear, through a month of village spite. Wicked and brisk, with a reveal that arrives too predictably.

A child's crayon heart in a bedside drawer, and beneath it a cheap gold necklace that should not exist. Debra Webb's new thriller is about a survivor whose story is being taken from her, and about two girls whose friendship went catastrophically wrong.

In a Devon meadow, someone has spelled a Latin word out of acorns. By breakfast the boy Kit Herondale swore never to see again is soaking wet on his doorstep. Clare's final Shadowhunter series begins with grief, a faerie prince and a long train ride.

A homeless woman in a peacock-blue hat corrects a stranger's grammar beside a fountain, then tells him the happiest and worst day of her life. Levi's word-of-mouth hit is tender and often very funny, though nearly everyone in it is redeemed on schedule.

Beside a duck pond in a Severyan forest, a mother tells her daughter that her strength is the quiet kind that grows in cracks and survives the frost. Gwynne's first Wolfheart novel is built on that idea: a girl who cannot speak, a family that will not let her go, and a witch with iron teeth.

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.

A Wampanoag-centred history of Plymouth that runs from an ancient homeland to a sachem's reburial in 2017, with the war of 1675 at its heart. Silverman makes the holiday's founding story impossible to hear the same way again, though his advocacy sometimes outruns his evidence.

Two barefoot boys run home across the Oklahoma prairie in 1895 with their trousers tied at the ankles and stuffed with pecans. Kimmerer's essays begin there and keep finding history, botany and family inside the plants at their feet, with a tendency to preach that the finest pieces never need.

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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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