Broadcaster Richie Brave, whose ancestors were enslaved, says organisers should be ‘asking themselves some questions’ The Radio 1Xtra host Richie Brave has said the Booker prize should consider changing its name because of its links to enslavement. Brave’s legal surname is Booker and his ancestors were enslaved by the founders of the company that originally sponsored the prize ..read more

The books will be released sequentially, starting with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with a full cast of yet-to-be-named actors and a ‘groundbreaking new soundscape’ New audiobooks of all seven titles in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series will be released exclusively on Audible in late 2025. More than 100 performers will be cast to voice the books’ various characters and “bring these iconic stories to life as never heard before”. A joint statement from Amazon-owned Audible and Pottermore Publishing, the audio and ebook publisher of the Harry Potter series, said the new audiobooks wil ..read more

From James Baldwin to Sarah Waters, writers have been telling rich, nuanced LGBTQ+ tales for decades – here are some good titles to try Cinema listings seem to be stacked with films about queer relationships at the moment. From the eerie yet tender romance in All of Us Strangers to the electric sapphic fling in the forthcoming Love Lies Bleeding, these new offerings feel refreshingly nuanced, placing LGBTQ+ characters centre stage without pandering to reductive narratives or heteronormative taste. If you want to find such stories in your reading, too, why not try some of the following books? W ..read more

This multigenerational tale travels from China to New York in search of the true meaning of good fortune It’s often said that good luck is the result of good planning: you make your own. But is our luck in life ever entirely under our control? And how much luck, and planning, might be enough? Real Americans, Rachel Khong’s second novel, strikes directly at the heart of these questions. Its Chinese-American characters are brought into contact with fabulous wealth – a prototypical stroke of luck. But their resulting choices demonstrate how the obsessive pursuit of money and control can warp ..read more

A woman searching for solitude runs into her sisters in this brilliant, brainy tale The Alternatives begins with a lecture on geological destruction. Olwen Flattery, a thirtysomething academic with a razor-sharp wit and a soft spot for hard liquor, tries to impress on a roomful of Galway undergraduates the aeons of tectonic convergence it took for the Earth to reach its current form, versus the terrifying speed at which we “needy, grabby, arsony narcissists” seem bent on destroying it. Olwen soon grows frustrated by the confines of the lecture theatre, the inability of words to ..read more

Australian actor’s book Rebel Rising will have allegations of incident on set of Grimsby that left her ‘feeling bullied, humiliated, and compromised’ struck out The UK edition of Australian actor Rebel Wilson’s memoir will be published with redacted passages relating to her experience on set with Sacha Baron Cohen. In a chapter titled Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes, Wilson recounts filming the 2016 comedy film Grimsby – released in the US as The Brothers Grimsby – alongside Baron Cohen. “SBC summoned me via a production assistant saying that I was needed to film an additional scene,” she ..read more

The fortysomething turned her wildest fantasy – about running off with a boyband member for hot sex in fabulous locations – into a bestseller. As it hits the screen, Lee talks about writing steamy scenes in Starbucks – and her terror of being judged Late one night, while her husband was away and her children were asleep, the writer Robinne Lee came across something that would change the course of her life. The US author, who now lives in Paris, found herself watching a particular boyband on YouTube – she refuses to name which – and felt attracted to one of them. When her husband came back from ..read more

The exhilarating story of an art fraudster’s downfall, by his former friend and partner In 2020 Inigo Philbrick was arrested by the FBI on the Pacific island of Vanuatu and brought to Manhattan in handcuffs. He was wanted for his part in one of the biggest art frauds in history. Still only in his early 30s, he was accused of duping art investors into parting with around $86m. Lawsuits were piling up, accusing him of forging legal documents, double-dealing priceless artworks and refusing to pay enormous debts to people he still called friends, (although the feeling almost certainly wasn’t mutua ..read more

A midlife couple take a hike through the Lake District in this witty and likable crowd-pleaser David Nicholls enjoys a bit of structural scaffolding. In his debut, 2003’s student romance Starter for Ten, it is the TV quiz University Challenge. A European Interrail itinerary forms a backdrop to empty-nester marital crisis in Us, and the love story One Day, which has sold more than 5m copies and is now a global Netflix hit, is made up of 20 years of St Swithin’s Days. His sixth novel, You Are Here, is pinned to geographical locations: a well-planned hike through the Lake District ..read more

His uncensored journals disclose a messier, more sexual, complex figure – and reveal much about the process of writing In the late summer of 1917, following the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him within a decade, Franz Kafka went to stay with his sister in the Bohemian countryside. During this unexpectedly calm period in an otherwise perennially besieged life, he wrote a series of aphorisms. One of them runs: “The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.” He mig ..read more