“Laidlaw brought Glasgow to life more viscerally than any book I had read before: the good and the bad, the language and the humour, the violence and the drinking … This book made me realise that pacey, streetwise thrillers didn’t have to be American: we had mean streets enough of our own.”
The Guardian asked great crime writers to pick their favourite crime novels, and Christopher Brookmyre thinks you should be reading William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw.
“An excellent new book is imminent: Fully Coherent Plan for a New and Better Society features 254 new illustrations, all drawn in his distinctive thick black pen on stark white paper, the naivety of the image offset by the scabrous, surreal or darkly comic text.”
David Shrigley interviewed in the Observer.
Observer
Robert Webb on gender conditioning (or, the way you’re told how to behave because of what’s in your pants) – from the number one bestseller How Not To Be a Boy.
Pre-order David Shrigley’s FULLY COHERENT PLAN
and you could win a fine statuette of his Fourth Plinth commission, to remind you forever that things are Really Good.
The Chosen Ones
The message had been carried through the dawn chorus and into the cold pink morning. Effie Truelove was going to die on Friday…
The Chosen Ones is the thrilling second book in the Worldquake sequence, out now!
Meg Jay talks to Robin Ince on Book Shambles about her book Supernormal, adversity and resilience.
If you haven’t yet listened to the Guardian’s new podcast The Start, about artistic beginnings, then you’re missing out. Our own Lemn Sissay was on talking about his poem ‘Invisible Kisses’, the early relationship that inspired it, and how as a child he was separated from his mother and his name. You can listen to the full episode, and the poem itself is included in Gold from the Stone.
We animated the cover for Sal by Mick Kitson! Illustration by Robert Hunter, voiceover from the audiobook, expertly read by Sharon Rooney.
“Richard Holloway is going to die. I, too, am going to die, and so, dear reader, are you. Holloway’s new book is a plangent and profound meditation on the ultimate inevitability.”
Stuart Kelly
Scotsman
“Because Holloway’s attachment to the rigid formulas of religious faith has loosened in the years since his retirement – he refers to himself as a “doubting priest” – he is the perfect inclusive guide to death. The free-flowing structure he adopts as he goes about his task is elegant, elegiac and thought-provoking; questions not answers, interspersed with material from a range of writers – WH Auden, Philip Larkin, C Day-Lewis, Edward St Aubyn and Atul Gawande.”
Observer
Stay With Me is the heart-rending, gripping (and Baileys-shortlisted) debut novel by Ayobami Adebayo. Listen to this extract from the audiobook, read by Adjoa Andoh.
From the Waterstones vlog: Liv talks The Book of Joan. “It is fiercely feminist, fiercely intelligent - unabashedly so - it’s raw, it’s vital, it’s bubbling and bristling, full of energy and it is absolutely fantastic.”
Ahmet Altan has been sentenced to life in prison
Journalist and author Ahmet Altan has been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Following the coup attempt of 2016, the Turkish government under President Erdogan instated a state of emergency and began a series of purges that have seen more than 150,000 people fired, detained or arrested. Ahmet was just one of the journalists and writers that have been tried – one of the charges against him was that he had appeared on television to share subliminal messages in support of the coup.
While he was awaiting trial he wrote the essay ‘The Writer’s Paradox’ – now he’s written another essay in the New York Times about his verdict and the cruel absurdity of the situation he is facing. It begins:
“They sit on a bench that is two meters high. They wear black robes with red collars. In a few hours they will decide my destiny. I look at them. They have loosened their ties out of boredom.”
Curtis Dawkins wrote his remarkable and profound short story collection The Graybar Hotel in prison in Michigan, where he is serving life with no possibility of parole. The money he has made from the book was going into a fund for his three children. Now the state is suing him for that money, to make him pay for his incarceration.
New York Times