Twelve stories I read in the second half of 2025 that made me wince at the world’s harshness and marvel at life’s goodness. ‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado ‘The Husband Stitch’ is from Carmen Maria Machado widely lauded short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. Its title refers to the extra stitch
This list of favourites I read in 2025 should help light the way to some fabulous holiday reading for you. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst – Actor Dave Win recreates episodes from his life as a gay, mixed-race person. Dave’s tenderest portrait is of his mother Avril, a seamstress, who brought him up alone in
Did you know that the Aldabra giant tortoise (at 4.5 metres per minute) is the most sluggish of all tortoises and that its poo provides a culinary feast for hermit crabs? What about the star-nosed mole, who can eat five times its body weight in a day, making it the world’s fastest eater? Or the
During the second half of 2025, these are the poems that leached through me with their eloquence on the red lamps of hindsight, a paper wasp kingdom, the round jubilance of peach and so much more. Read on … ‘Separation’ by Marie Howe Driving out of town, I see him crossing / the Brooks Pharmacy
Eleven stories that sketched their way across my heart in the first half of 2025. ‘Grand Canyon’ by Laura Elvery ‘Grand Canyon’ is from Laura Elvery’s Ordinary Matter, her second collection – a suite of 20 stories inspired by women honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research. Marie Curie won the prize twice. In
Snowy hair, oxbowed limbs, fretworked bone, the snout of a pen and fingerpainting paths of kikuyu … Come! Enjoy the verbal and visceral wonders of the poems I loved most during the first half of 2025. ‘Obit’ (from section III) by Victoria Chang My children, children / today my hands are dreaming / as they touch your
Heading into the holidays? Here’s a handy list of favourites I read in 2024 to guide your reading. The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes – This is climate fiction at its best and most poignant and, as Hughes notes, ‘Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction.’ My
Listen up … I loved these poems when I read them during the last half of 2024. I hope you also enjoy their different music. ‘Object Permanence’ by Madeleine Cravens The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole / time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn. / Everyone I love
Some of the best short stories I read in the second half of 2024 included circus mammas, love, grief and philosophy, and a prickly character called Pearl who curls into an armchair ‘like cream’. I hope you lap them up! ‘The Mothers and The Girls’ by Saba Sams In Send Nudes Saba Sams immerses us
When it comes to naming extinct animals, most of us would probably know the dodo and the woolly mammoth. But how many of the over 900 species classified as extinct since 1500, and the over 44,000 species threatened with extinction, could we actually name? The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Extinct Animals by Sami Bayly can help
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