Books

The inspiring story of Preston’s rebirth highlights some telling lessons and limits of localism, writes James Foley

It’s time to protect books and those who create them, writes Jean Findlay

Shirley Jackson’s subversive horror story The Lottery remains as pertinent today as when it first appeared seventy years ago, writes Sibylla Kalid

By puppeteer and children’s author Tania Czajka

Katherine Hill’s timely book offers parents practical advice to help children negotiate the digital world, writes Alex Borthwick

Alistair Braidwood who worked as a secretary for Alasdair Gray, and was an editor on ‘Of Me & Others’, pays tribute to a brilliant, kind and peerless polymath

Alan McCredie on a truly timeless classic

Petra Reid on a radical ’60s classic still relevant today

By Amy Jardine

The highly lauded Nell Zink is one of many US writers considering the challenges of activism today, but her work lacks one vital element, writes Sibylla Kalid

A former UK ambassador to the EU lays out the clusterfuck that follows a retreat from reality, writes Ronnie McCluskey

Shoshana Zuboff’s treatise “Surveillance Capitalism” warns how big data commodifies us all, writes Nik Williams

Which novel would you recommend to someone who had never read a word written in your country? The first stop on our tour is Scotland, where Alan Warner highlights James Kelman’s astonishing Kieron Smith, boy

Sceptical of the form, Sara Lally is won over by three of 2018’s most intriguing graphic novels

Author Mick Kitson tells Sibylla Archdale Khalid how he conjured Sal, one of the most compelling literary characters of 2018

Brilliant and uncompromising, Doris Lessing inspired Amy Jardine to conquer fear, start writing and live a fuller life

If you could only recommend one novel from your country, which would it be? Ana Iliescu salutes Mircea Cartarescu’s Orbitor, a triumph of Romanian literature

Daisy Johnson talks to Naomi Richards about the power of myths, metamorphis and the art of writing her new novel.

Bill Hicks has been derided as an anti-corporate fanatic, UFO devotee and gun fetishist. But what he would really have hated is being described as the lost saviour of stand-up, writes Allan Brown

Sam Knee talks to Neil Cooper about Untypical Girls, his new book about pioneering all-female bands from post punk to riot grrrl

Did the former Stoke MP lift sections of a long ago OU book for his 2004 historical tome? One of the original authors Chris Harvie finds it oddly familiar

The creators of Britain’s first counter cultural paper talk to Neil Cooper about their new visual catalogue of the ’60s radical underground press

Author Malcolm Devlin discusses fairy tales, genre-jumping and placating restless stories with Naomi Richards