Drawing on his own near-death experience, the author finds a powerful intensity in this tale of a young man’s convalescence in a Cornish village

“I had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.� Following a cardiac arrest which left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s moving debut novel, has retreated to the Cornish village where he grew up, to shelter under the protection of his “off-gridder� uncle, Jacob.

His mother dead of cancer and his father long gone, at 20 Jago’s world seems to have shrunk to nothing but the hard daily labour of working a subsistence farm high above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life Jago had begun to construct in the city, “a runaway train� in flight from his mother’s death and everything that reminded him of her, has evaporated abruptly in the aftermath of his near-death experience. He has “gone from someone who needed to slow down, to be present, to someone having no choice about it�, and must start from scratch.

How billions of trees left their mark on an empire’s psyche – shaping ideological and literal battles up to the present day

When Sophie Pinkham opens her fascinating book with the claim that “Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy�, it might seem as though she is merely using a poetic turn of phrase. But the statistic is correct: while the Milky Way is estimated to have roughly 200bn stars, Russia has something in the region of 642bn trees. Stretching from the Arctic tundra to central Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian forest is vast, mighty and inhospitable. Yet while it is a source of potential danger, it is also a place of great beauty and potential riches, providing furs, minerals and rivers overflowing with salmon.

Pinkham, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University whose last book explored the intricacies of post-Soviet Ukraine, here charts the landscape’s influence on the Russian psyche, and its imprint on history, society and literature. The forest is deeply entwined with Russian national identity – the country is often symbolically represented as a bear – yet attitudes towards it have fluctuated. Different leaders have proposed different strategies for extracting value from the land, leading to cycles of deforestation and tree-planting depending on whether the priority was boosting agriculture, building Peter the Great’s imperial fleet, extracting minerals or constructing hydroelectric dams. Politically, it has been a place of resistance and of ultranationalist rhetoric glorifying the idea of Russian self-sufficiency.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Ever since my father presented me with a copy of The Unicorn, beautifully translated into my mother tongue, I have been an ardent admirer of Iris Murdoch’s. I went on to read all of her novels, plays and poetry with great enthusiasm. Before Christmas, I returned to her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, having remembered very little of it. Yet from the very first page, I was reminded why I have always loved her work so deeply: the prose is rich, precise, disciplined and meticulously detailed; the many characters are so vividly rendered that none appears two-dimensional; each experiences and processes reality in a way that feels distinct and unmistakably individual; and the pacing of events feels perfectly judged. Although the novel is threaded with philosophical reflections on goodness and love, these never feel laboured or artificially imposed. Rather, they emerge naturally as an integral part of the novel’s dense and intricate tapestry.

From Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

This quietly satirical speculative novel tells a story of metamorphosis, but feels insulated from real ecological crisis

In the book-length essay Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk gives a potted history of fiction in which humans turn into plants. There is Daphne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is so afraid she will be raped by Apollo that she begs her father to transform her into a laurel tree. More recently, in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, brutalised Yeong-hye refuses food and takes root. Wilk argues that, in these stories and others, “a woman implants herself in despair, but also protest�.

Rhett Davis’s Arborescence – an even-tempered, quietly satirical speculative novel – tells a story of cross-species transformation at scale. The narrator is a man, Bren, who at the outset is dismissive of unverified reports of “people standing around believing they’re trees�. His partner, Caelyn, is curious and undaunted. She drags him out for a hike. “I’m not sure I like forests,� he complains. “I don’t like that part of The Lord of the Rings at all. It’s really terrifying.�

This is a witty takedown of insufferable millennial New Yorkers who have managed to ruin even sex

In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, Cora, a millennial mother, craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who is “chief storytelling officer� at a mortgage start-up (yes, that’s his job title. They all have absurd jobs). The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. I’d call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down.

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness� of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They hang out with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because of her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city�. Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence�.

New books by Liza Minelli, David Sedaris, Maggie O’Farrell and Yann Martel are among the literary highlights of the year ahead

2026 is already promising plenty of unmissable releases: there are new novels by George Saunders, Ali Smith and Douglas Stuart, memoirs from Gisèle Pelicot, Lena Dunham and Mark Haddon, and plenty of inventive debuts to look forward to. Here, browse all the biggest titles set to hit shelves in the coming months across fiction and nonfiction, selected by the Guardian’s books desk.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a festive mystery to a kaleidoscopic ode to the animal kingdom

New novels from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ian McEwan, plus the return of Slow Horses and Margaret Atwood looks back … Guardian critics pick the must-read titles of 2025

The Guardian’s fiction editor picks the best of the year, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count to Thomas Pynchon’s return, David Szalay’s Booker winner and a remarkable collection of short stories.

From territorial overreach to deportations, the current president is not as much of an anomaly as he might seem

‘Almost everyone is a little bit in love with the USA,� declares Edward Stourton in his introduction to Made in America. And why not? It is the land of razzle-dazzle and high ideals, of jazz music, Bogart and Bacall, Harriet Tubman and Hamilton, a nation that was anti-colonialist and pro-liberty from its conception, whose Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal�. Why, then, does this same country so often produce clown-show politics, racism at home and abroad, and imperial ambitions, latterly in Greenland and Canada? Why does it regularly show contempt for the world order it helped create? Why did it once again elect Donald Trump?

These contradictions have kept an army of journalists, White House-watchers and soothsayers in business for generations. Alistair Cooke, perhaps the greatest British exponent of the genre, interpreted the country via the minutiae of everyday life, observing people at the beach, say, or riding the subway. Stourton, another BBC veteran, who first reported from Washington in the Reagan years, takes almost the opposite approach. He looks at Trump and Trumpism through the run of history, arguing in a series of insightful essays that the 47th Potus is not an American aberration but a continuation, an echo of dark and often neglected aspects of the country’s past. Trump, he concludes, is “as American as apple pie�.

Her voice soundtracked the 60s and 70s, but the revolution silenced her. The legendary singer finally has her say, in this uneven memoir

If you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has gone from singer to cultural icon, a symbol of a country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and muzzled artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and the diaspora.

Googoosh was just three years old when she started singing in small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. By her teens she was a film actor and a fashion icon. In the 60s and 70s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in films, magazines, on the radio. She kept recreating herself – her style, her moves, her hair. (My mother and many of her university classmates copied Googosh’s famous wispy haircut.) For a while, this bold, creative young woman shaped how westerners saw Iran, and how a generation of Iranian women understood modernity, femininity and public life.

A vivid account of the creation of one of literary modernism’s greatest achievements

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,� he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.�

Morten Høi Jensen’s approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.

A vivid and chilling account of the deadly voyage that triggered the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade

Over the nearly four centuries during which the transatlantic slave trade operated, 12.5 million Africans were trafficked by Europeans to the Americas. 1.8 million of them perished on the voyage under scarcely imaginable conditions of overcrowding, filth and disease. Some threw themselves overboard. And others were thrown into the sea.

In The Zorg, Siddharth Kara tells two stories. The first is of a harrowing incident aboard the eponymous slave ship – the murder of 132 Africans by the British crew. The second relates how that event came to play a role in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, in large part through the work of a dazzling array of committed campaigners. One of these was Olaudah Equiano, author of one of the few surviving accounts of the Middle Passage from the perspective of an enslaved person, in which he described it as “a scene of horror almost inconceivable�.

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien; Plastic by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door by Michelle Penn; Jonah and Me by John F Deane; Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)
This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the passing of friends and loved ones as well as human desire and culpability. A central sequence entitled Impasse is inspired by Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. These poems plunge us into the landscape of the detective hero’s world, a process O’Brien describes as “analogous to dream-life, where certain motifs (cities, railway stations, libraries in my case) recur without ever abolishing the mystery that animates them�. The penultimate poem of the final sequence ushers in an elegiac, pensive tone as the speaker reminds us not to forget “birdsong / the descant of the rising lark / that never ends, composed of silence�. The book reinforces O’Brien’s authority as a chronicler of our times, “love and death consorting as they must�.

Plastic by Matthew Rice (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
This book-length poem explores the experiences of a night worker turned poet. Structured as a continuous narrative, it illustrates the frustrations, inequities and relentless cycle of 21st-century manual labour: “The night is proletarian, a morgue of ghosts / given the present is a borderline�. Rice documents the tragic incidents and surreal imaginings that occur within the nightmarish confines of a plastic moulding factory. “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift / for good at the end of a rope / another’s heart gave out at 3am / performing a task as menial as mine.� This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with “hell as an idea of what work could be�; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, “the treasure buried in my father’s field�.

In this energisingly original novel, an emotionally detached English student at college in New York tells a big lie

Lies offend our sense of justice: generally, we want to see the liar unmasked and punished. But when the deception brings no material gain, we might also be curious about what purpose the lie serves – what particular need of their own the liar is attempting to meet. This is precisely what Grace Murray’s witty, assured debut explores: not just the consequences of a lie but the ways in which it can, paradoxically, reveal certain truths.

At a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year by claiming that her father has just died of a heart attack. In fact, he is alive and well back in Lichfield, England. This lie is the jumping-off point for an unpacking of Charlotte’s psychology, as well as the catalyst for her relationship with fellow student Katarina, a quasi-love story that forms the book’s main narrative.

Two brothers attempt to escape their father’s gangland past in a tense, tender debut that moves between Thatcher-era Northumberland and southern Spain

Andalucía is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson’s debut novel, which is its own kind of spectacular mosaic. Built from short, seemingly discrete chapters that take us between Spain in 2003 and the coalfields of Northumberland in the 70s and 80s, The Dead Don’t Bleed coheres into an extraordinarily tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father’s gangland past.

Until now, Rollinson has been known as a poet; his collection Talking Dead was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa poetry prize. Here he brings his talent for compressed evocation to an exploration of fraternal rivalry and the enduring impact of a violent patriarchy. If you took Frank and his brother Gordon apart on the autopsy table, he writes, “you’d find the same bones, the same blood. Almost everything interchangeable. The corkscrews of DNA, the cells, the posture, the downcast glance.� But from a young age, change is afoot within Frank. He knows his father has “high hopes for him� in the family business of petty crime: “Frank Bridge. King of Northumberland�. But Frank wants to be a different kind of king. He carries within himself a “yearning for something more expansive� – the kind of dream that could get him killed in his family’s closed world of criminal secrecy.

Set in a colonial city after the first world war, this story of a battle of wills between an elderly widow and her young servant is deftly told

The second novel by South African author Nadia Davids, winner of the 2024 Caine prize, is set in a “small unnamed city in a colonial empire�, shortly after the end of the first world war. We might imagine it as a version of Cape Town – birthplace of the author, and of JM Coetzee, whose endorsement appears on the back cover.

Soraya, a 19-year-old woman from the Muslim quarter, is sent by her mother to work as a maid in a wealthy part of town. Her new employer, the elderly Mrs Hattingh, is a settler who fondly recalls her days “when I was a girl in England�. When the novel opens, in 1920, Mrs Hattingh lives alone: her husband is dead, and her son, Timothy, fortunate to have survived the war, lives far away in London.

The return of Charlie and Lola; the second lives of trees; the dangers of time travel; a YA Bluebeard retelling and more

The Street Where Santa Lives by Harriet Howe and Julia Christians, Little Tiger, £12.99
When an old man moves in on a busy street, only his little neighbour notices; with his white beard and round belly, she’s convinced he’s Santa. But when Santa falls ill, other neighbours must rally round to take care of him. Will he be better in time for Christmas? This sweet, funny, acutely observed picture book is a festive, joyous celebration of community.

I Am Wishing Every Minute for Christmas by Lauren Child, S&S, £12.99
Twenty-five years after their first appearance, this delightful, engaging new Charlie and Lola picture book is filled with Lola’s excited impatience as she and her big brother get everything ready for Christmas.

The healing power of gardens; celebrating an abolitionist; hope in the toughest times; a gladiator romantasy and more

The Butterfly House by Harry Woodgate, Andersen, £12.99
Miss Brown’s wild garden scares most people, but when Holly discovers her reclusive neighbour’s sadness, she decides to help turn the wilderness into a butterfly haven. A beautiful, moving picture book about the healing power of gardens and community.

The History of We by Nikkolas Smith, Rock the Boat, £8.99
Via rich, dynamic paintings and thoughtful pared-back text, Smith answers the question “What does the beginning look like?� with this powerful picture book, the shared story of humanity’s first ancestors in “the fertile cradle of Africa�.

A bothered bear; a great guide to drawing; a life of Josephine Baker; a role model daughter; a search for words and more

Bear’s Nap by Emily Gravett, Two Hoots, £12.99
Someone is cheeping and keeping Bear from sleeping in this increasingly uproarious picture book filled with forest-dwelling creatures and their noises. A joy to read aloud.

This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, Andersen, £12.99
A moving celebration of heritage and identity, this softly coloured picture book follows a little girl with “a foot in two worlds�, who is both “the richness of all the worlds she belongs to� and uniquely, proudly herself.

A huge brolly; sibling revelry; poetic Paris; first aid for youngsters; Regency blackmail; blackly comic YA fiction and more

A Totally Big Umbrella by Sarah Crossan, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, Walker, £12.99
Rain ruins all Tallulah’s favourite things until she finds a really huge umbrella – but it’s so big it holds her back. Could there be worse things than getting wet? Enchanting and imaginative, this gentle, playful picture book addresses an anxious child’s need to find control.

The Elephant and the Piano by Colette Hiller, illustrated by Nabila Adani, Magic Cat, £7.99
Short-tempered and destructive, Bonti the elephant is all alone – until the music of a piano reaches him. A luminous, touching picture book, based on a true story.

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it�, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.�

But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole�.

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,� he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.�

Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author

After the ­phenomenal global success, not to mention timeliness, of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, Margaret Atwood has been regarded as “a combination of figurehead, prophet and saint�, the author writes in her new memoir Book of Lives. Over 600 pages this “memoir of sorts� ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.

The author, who turned 86 last week, always likes to take the long view, often from a couple of centuries’ distance. As Rebecca Solnit notes below, she now has a long view of our times. Age and the freedom of being a writer (as she says, she can’t get sacked) make her fearless in speaking out.

The novelist on how The Rainbow made him want to write, the strange genius of Penelope Fitzgerald and finding comfort in Tintin

My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon.

My favourite book growing up
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It’s a story set in Roman Britain; the Eagle is the lost standard of the ninth legion. I was a boy already obsessed by all things Ancient Roman (the alternative to the kind of boy obsessed with dinosaurs). One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. To me, this voluptuous woman gazing at herself in a mirror was my mother. It’s interesting to me how the setting in which you read is such an integral part of the reading experience.

From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsibly

There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis� has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends�.

But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity.

The science writer pragmatically shows how optimism can bring about real improvements in everyday life and change in the wider world

Can optimism influence events in your life? Does fate smile upon those who see the glass as half full? The science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury believes so. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World is his hymn to positivity, though fear not: it’s not a self-help book and there is more to it than platitudes about manifesting and living your best life.

The author realised he was a natural optimist following the premature death of his wife from cancer. In the aftermath, he made an active decision “not to spend any more time in limbo than I already had� and “cultivated the idea that the future would be bright�. Optimism is, he says, “central to the human psyche�. It fosters social progress and encourages individuals to be resilient and withstand stress, to be more successful at work and create stronger bonds with friends and family. Among the models for optimism offered here are Ernest Shackleton who, along with his crew, survived being stranded in the Antarctic, and Helen Keller, who lost her hearing and sight after a childhood illness and later, in her 1903 essay Optimism, wrote about discovering hope and joy.

A faultless lyric from 1887 mourns what seems to be repressed gay love

Renegade

To Arthur Chamberlain